Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

by John Lahr

  Williams spent two lonely weeks in Los Angeles. (“Loathe every minute of it,” he wrote in his diary.) His talks with Kazan produced another five-page letter of director’s notes about the outstanding problem: the dramatization of Brick, whose mystery, for Williams, was “the poem of the play, not its story but the poem of the story.” “I do get his point but I’m afraid he doesn’t quite get mine,” Williams wrote in his diary. “Things are not always explained. Situations are not always resolved. Characters don’t always ‘progress.’ But I shall, of course, try to arrive at an another compromise with him.”

  Burl Ives as Big Daddy and Ben Gazzara as Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

  For Kazan, at least one crucial detail about the show was resolved: he would direct it. In a memorandum to Molly Day Thacher, he wrote:

  I’m going to do the Williams play. I just admire that fellow. I really do. We’ve had some wonderful talks. We’ve got somewhere conceptually. He’s terribly honest. Sometimes I fill with admiration for him. And I’ve never been able to talk to any author as I’m able to talk with him. Unreserved (Except Moss Hart on GA [Gentleman’s Agreement] . . . The title of the play is CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF. Isn’t that just a hell of a title. Margaret now is “sympathetic” whatever the hell that means. Anyway I think the audience will end up with a tough grudging admiration for her. . . . And I’ve found something for Brick to do in Act Three AND I’ve influenced Big Daddy to totally reject Brick’s explanation in Act Two. Or at least Brick’s attack on his explanation.

  From the beginning of their conversations about the play, Kazan had argued that Brick needed to be made theatrically dynamic, not just poetically impassive. “I ‘buy’ a lot of your letter but of course not all,” Williams wrote to Kazan at 4:30 A.M. from his Beverly Hills hotel. “Possibly I ‘buy’ more than half, and after a couple of nights studying it out, I think I understand it.” Williams went on, “To be brief: the part I buy is that there has to be a reason for Brick’s impasse (his drinking is only an expression of it) that will ‘hold water.’ ” Williams had come to the narrative conclusion that Brick did love Skipper, whom he identified with sports, “the romantic world of adolescence which he couldn’t go past.” Williams went on:

  Further: to reverse my original (somewhat tentative) premise, I now believe that, in the deeper sense, not the literal sense, Brick is homosexual with a heterosexual adjustment: a thing I’ve suspected of several others, such as Brando, for instance. (He hasn’t cracked up but I think he bears watching. He strikes me as being a compulsive eccentric.) I think these people are often undersexed, prefer pet raccoons or sports or something to sex with either gender. They have deep attachments, idealistic, romantic: sublimated loves! They are terrible Puritans. (Marlon dislikes me. Why? I’m “corrupt.”) These people may have a glandular set-up which will keep them “banked,” at low-pressure, enough to get by without the eventual crack-up. Take Brando again: he’s smoldering with something and I don’t think it’s Josanne! Sorry to make him my guinea pig in this analysis (Please give this letter back to me!) but he’s the nearest thing to Brick that we both know. Their innocence, their blindness, makes them very, very touching, very beautiful and sad. Often they make fine artists, having to sublimate so much of their love, and believe me, homosexual love is something that also requires more than a physical expression. But if a mask is ripped off, suddenly, roughly, that’s quite enough to blast the whole Mechanism, the whole adjustment, knock the world out from under their feet, and leave them no alternative but—owning up to the truth or retreat into something like liquor.

  Ripping away Brick’s mask and then sustaining his story into act 3 was Williams’s challenge. Less than a month before rehearsals, Kazan was still complaining. “Brick gives me a pain in the well-known part in Act III, the first seven-eighths of it. He seems to be exactly the same as he was at the beginning of Act I,” he said, adding in a letter a week later, “Tenn, it’s the job of the playwright to tell the truth. You aren’t telling the final truth about Brick. You unveil a bit of him in Act I, another bit, a good-sized bit in Act II, and then back he goes hidden, hopeless, mannered, untouchable. And above all he acts as though Act II never happened.” Kazan added, “Can’t he be a lovable, bright, brilliant, funny drunk instead of a self-pitying, hopelessly immersed drunk?” At the climax of act 2, when Brick talks about Skipper’s phone call—the call in which he issued the rejection that led to Skipper’s suicide—Kazan urged Williams to “go a little further” and to exploit the situation “for everything it’s worth” in order to hang “a heavier load of guilt on Brick” to explain his paralysis. Kazan dummied up some dialogue for his resistant author:

  BIG DADDY: What did you say to him?

  BRICK: Nothing.

  BIG DADDY: Nothing?

  BRICK: I hung up.

  BIG DADDY: You said nothing? You hung up?

  BRICK: I hung up. What could I say?

  BIG DADDY: He was your friend. You had to say something to him.

  In the rewritten scene, which upped the theatrical ante for both main characters, Williams transformed Kazan’s suggestion into a sensational demonstration of Brick’s habit of denial:

  BIG DADDY: You musta said somethin’ to him before he hung up.

  BRICK: What could I say to him?

  BIG DADDY: Anything. Something.

  BRICK: Nothing.

  BIG DADDY: Just hung up?

  BRICK: Just hung up.

  BIG DADDY: Uh-huh. Anyhow now!—we have tracked down the lie with which you’re disgusted and which you are drinking to kill your disgust with, Brick. You been passing the buck. This disgust with mendacity is disgust with yourself. You!—dug the grave of your friend and kicked him in it!—before you’d face the truth with him!

  BRICK: His truth, not mine!

  BIG DADDY: His truth, okay! But you wouldn’t face it with him!

  BRICK: Who can face truth? Can you?

  Kazan was “worried sick” about the third act, in which Brick kept singing and mooning about on the veranda but doing nothing. He kept wondering how to keep Brick center stage, how to keep his thinking and feeling, his experience continually before the audience. “God, Tenn, can’t we bring that son of a bitch to life,” he wrote. “Brick all thru! That’s the job!” he wrote to Williams, before rehearsals started.

  His case was strong. The arc of act 2 was entirely about Brick and the dilemma of bringing him back to life. “We see here, just as we did in Act I, that he is far, far, FAR from not giving a damn . . . that he is violent as a volcano underneath and is simply full of doubt and guilt,” Kazan wrote to Williams. “Then something really revolutionary happens to him. Big Daddy states that the mendacity that he is disgusted with is his own. That he has been blaming Maggie for a murder that he committed—that he is disgusted with himself for having betrayed his best friend.” Kazan pressed on: “Now Brick has no answer to this. He, in fact, admits Big Daddy is right when he says: ‘Can you stand the truth???’ He admits, then, does he not, that what Big Daddy said was true.” Kazan continued:

  The boy is aroused to murder at the end of Act I and around to practically killing his father in Act II. The playwright has done his job. He has put Brick into a situation that forces him out of his shell, that brings him out from under cover, and so on. And there is at the end of Act II this piece of SPIRITUAL RECOGNITION. The boy is brought face to face with his own lie.

  I should hope by this time in the play the audience will be FEELING (I’m not talking about thinking, or appreciating or enjoying—I’m talking about the basic theatre experience, the very basic one) I should hope by this time that the audience is sitting in the goddam theatre to see how two things turn out, sitting there very very partisan, as they should be. They should want Brick to face the lie he told himself and atone for the torture he perpetuated on Maggie. And DO something about it! They will want to see what he does. He’s got to do something.

  “It’s only fair to put you on notice that I’ll be striving—
I can’t do different—to keep Brick and his thinking, his development, smack in the audience’s eye all thru Act III,” Kazan told Williams as they approached rehearsals, adding, “I have to work to show that there has been a progression within him, no matter how deeply concealed.” To that end, Kazan asked for Brick to sing; he got it. He asked for Brick to forgo the estate; he got it. Kazan wanted Brick to have more humanity and more agency. “Can we make him funny and truth-telling so IN THAT WAY reveal his pain and self-disgust? Can’t we feel that above all he wants to make up to Maggie for the torture he gave her?” he asked Williams. Kazan got that too. As the family jostles for position in Big Daddy’s will, the childless Maggie ups the ante by suddenly announcing in front of the patriarch that she’s pregnant—a sort of Hail Mary pass that Brick witnesses with both shock and awe. “Truth is something desperate, an’ she’s got it,” Brick says, coming to Maggie’s defense when Gooper and Mae call it a lie. “Believe me, it’s somethin’ desperate, an’ she’s got it.” Brick goes on, “An’ now, if you will stop actin’ as if Brick Pollitt was dead and buried, invisible, not heard, an’ go on back to your peep-hole in the wall—I’m drunk, and sleepy—not as alive as Maggie, but still alive.”

  Williams’s rewrites gave Kazan precisely what he had asked for. Kazan also had overridden Williams’s initial disapproval of Jo Mielziner’s abstract set (“a meaningless piece of chi-chi”) and of the casting of Burl Ives as Big Daddy (“acted like a stuffed turkey”) and Barbara Bel Geddes as Maggie (“inadequate”). Kazan had even coaxed Williams to soften his ending. On the first day of rehearsal, sensing a disaster, Williams wrote in his diary, “Already making plans for a far away flight (perhaps as far as Ceylon) the night the play opens in New York!” But, once the show was up and running in Philadelphia, it was hard to argue with its success. The reviews were rapturous; the box office, according to Variety, was “torrid.” Kazan’s structural demands had given the play its satisfying wallop, and Williams knew it. “I am being utterly sincere when I say that, on the whole, you have done one of your greatest jobs,” Williams wrote to him after their last rehearsal before Philadelphia, signing himself, “Devotedly.”

  The thing that gave Williams the most pause was the show’s revised ending, in which Brick was tempted back into the marital bed. All disclaimers to the contrary—“I didn’t write, plan, or edit the ‘commercial’ third act,” Kazan wrote in his autobiography, a statement that is belied by his notes to Williams—Kazan had winkled out of Williams this softer ending, which changed the play’s thematic attack on the couple. At the finale, in the Kazan version, as she tries to coax him to create an heir, Maggie strikes a perverse bargain with Brick. “I told a lie to Big Daddy, but we can make that lie come true,” she tells him. “And then I’ll bring you liquor, and we’ll get drunk together, here, tonight, in this place that death has come into! What do you say? What do you say, baby?”

  Maggie has pitched all Brick’s liquor bottles off the veranda, and he is unable to go and get more. He has lost his driver’s license, and if he went to get booze himself, Maggie says, “I’d phone ahead and have you stopped on the highway.” He’s checkmated. Now, however, she’s prepared to collude in his self-destruction. Brick finds affirmative words. “I admire you, Maggie,” he says, sitting at the edge of the bed. Maggie kneels beside him. “Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace,” she says. “What you need is someone to take hold of you—gently, with love, and hand your life back to you, like something gold you let go of—and I can! I’m determined to do it—and nothing’s more determined than a cat on a tin roof—is there? Is there, Baby?” For the first time, Brick allows himself to be touched by Maggie—“She touches his cheek, gently,” the stage direction reads—a gesture that holds out the possibility of reunification. The curtain comes down on this moment of connection.

  Burl Ives in the dressing room during a production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

  In the original ending, most of which Williams restored for the 1974 Broadway production and the play’s subsequent republication, Brick refuses to surrender to Maggie and her blandishments. “What do you say?” she says. “I don’t say anything. I guess there’s nothing to say,” he replies. His hatred for himself and for Maggie remains immutable; he submits to nothing but his own destructiveness. Nonetheless, Maggie whispers, “I do love you, Brick. I do!” Echoing Big Daddy’s fierce words, in the play’s curtain line, Brick says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that was true?” This ending, according to Williams, was appropriately hard for a play that said only one affirmative thing about man’s fate: “that he has it still in his power not to squeal like a pig but to keep a tight mouth about it . . . and also that love is possible: not proven or disproven, but possible.”

  ON OPENING NIGHT, March 24, 1955, at the Morosco Theatre on Forty-Fifth Street, Williams took his seat beside Britneva, who was his date. During the first act, he was agitated, muttering to himself so loudly that people around him had to shush him. He and Britneva sat out most of the second half at a bar across from the theater; they returned to watch the crucial final scene between Maggie and Brick. “The New York opening of Cat was particularly dreadful,” Williams recalled in Memoirs. The audience ovation and the backstage bravado only intensified his moroseness. By some miscue, Wood and Liebling did not go to celebrate with Williams at Kazan’s house afterward; misreading their absence as a judgment on the evening, Williams took umbrage. When they met up later at the cast party, according to Wood, Williams “was in such a state of anger he would not speak to me. He behaved as if he were a deserted child who’d been abandoned in a snow-storm by untrustworthy relatives, or hurtful friends.”

  As diminutive and regal as she was, Wood was also the embodiment of Broadway commerce, a purveyor of quality goods: she had encouraged a full-length play, a third act, the return of Big Daddy, and a satisfying ending that gave Brick and Maggie at least some glimmer of hope. Williams, who judged the first night “a failure, a distortion of what I had intended,” acted out his fury with the one person he trusted most in the world. He told Wood that she had ruined his play. Wood wanted to go home, but Liebling convinced Williams to go with them to get the first-night reviews.

  “The wait for the morning notices to come out was one of the most unendurable intervals of my life,” Williams said. They picked up the papers and went over to Forty-Third Street and Broadway to pore over them at Toffenetti’s. “ ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ is Mr. Williams’s finest drama,” Brooks Atkinson wrote, adding, “Always a seeker after honesty in his writing, Mr. Williams has not only found a solid part of the truth but found the way to say it with complete honesty.” “Mr. Williams is the man of our time who comes closest to hurling the actual blood and bone of life onto the stage,” Walter Kerr said in the Herald Tribune. To Williams, each rave review—“the production has no flaw” (Walter Kerr), “enormous theatrical power” (Richard Watts Jr., New York Post)—was as much cause for laceration as celebration. He was convinced that, for commercial success, he had sold out the truth of his characters and his heart. In silence, at three o’clock in the morning, Williams, Wood, and Liebling sat together in a booth while Williams read his thick stack of opening-night telegrams one by one. “He studiously refused to permit us to see any of his messages. He continued to behave as if he were completely alone,” the bemused Wood recalled. She and Liebling were witnessing in person what Williams had just dramatized in Cat: “the shocking duality of the single heart.”

  Williams’s bread-and-butter note to Atkinson the next day—“Now that you’ve written your lovely notice I can tell you that I would have just died if you hadn’t liked and praised ‘Cat,’ ” he began—was full of self-loathing for his “fearful lack of security,” his “abysmal self-doubt,” his “invidious resentment of [William] Inge’s great success,” his “hideous competitiveness which I never had in me before!” In a postscript, Williams added:

  Some time I would like you to read the original (first) version of Cat
before I re-wrote Act III for production purposes. Both versions will be published, and, confidentially, I do mean confidentially, I still much prefer the original. It was harder and purer: a blacker play but one that cut closer to the bone of the truth I believe. I doubt that it would have had the chance of success that the present version has and since I had so desperate a need of success, and reassurance about my work, I think all in all Kazan was quite right in persuading me to shape Act III about the return of Big Daddy.

  The published version of the play contained both the original and the Broadway versions. Williams perpetuated the legend of the play and its “commercial ending” in the accompanying essay “Note of Explanation,” in which he portrayed himself as a hapless author victimized by the exigencies of commercial theater and the power of his director. “I wanted Kazan to direct the play, and though these suggestions were not made in the form of an ultimatum, I was fearful that I would lose his interest if I didn’t re-examine the script from this point of view,” he wrote. These weasel words, as Kazan later pointed out, “gave people generally the idea that I had forced you to rewrite ‘Cat.’ I can’t force you to rewrite anything, first because you are strong, secondly because you are protected by your Guild.” Kazan went on, “I’ve come to the conclusion that somehow you were willing to have me blamed for the faults in your plays, while you were praised for their virtues.”

  Williams owed Kazan more than he could admit to himself, or to the public. The thrust of the original version of Cat had certainly changed, but so had the play’s clarity, depth, structure, and dynamism. It won every theatrical award for best play, including the Pulitzer Prize. By May 1955, the production had paid back its original investment of $102,000; it went on to play almost seven hundred performances. Williams owed Kazan, as he acknowledged in a letter, “a success when I had given up thought of anything but failure, and a sort of vague whimpering end to life.”