by John Lahr
To beg a question
Of the year’s quartet:
Winter, wolverine,
Is present—
Never past.
Elusive summer, rare,
Improvises—
Thinks it is
A tree,
A blade of grass,
A pollinating bee;
While cold snakes
Court
July’s warm air
Under warmed rocks,
And thrill,
With coldly coursing blood,
Thermal stone
That happened to be there.
Think hard
On seasons flying fast.
If Williams’s personal life was held in a precarious balance, his professional one had already begun to unravel. On April 21, 1960, Kazan, “looking rather shaky and gray in the face,” according to Williams, met for a drink and told him that he was quitting as the director of Period of Adjustment—a seismic blow that ended the most important theatrical collaboration of twentieth-century American theater.
After the success of Sweet Bird, Kazan had told Williams that he would direct anything he wrote, “sight unseen and unread.” The Broadway theater had been booked. The producing triumvirate of Kazan, Crawford, and Mielziner had been assembled. Kazan’s surprise announcement pole-axed Williams. “I tried my best to make him change his mind, but he was adamant,” Williams told the New York Times.
Williams’s fury was compounded by the fact that Kazan was leaving the play in order to direct a film project by Williams’s friend and theatrical rival William Inge (Splendor in the Grass), which Kazan said Williams took as a “signal that I preferred working with Inge.” Williams was openly jealous, even sometimes bitchy about Inge, who’d had three hits in a row, including Bus Stop and Picnic. (Inge owed the launching of his career to Williams, who had befriended him in 1944 during the pre-opening run of The Glass Menagerie in Chicago, when Inge had interviewed him for the St. Louis Star-Times. Back then, Inge was trying and failing to write plays in the manner of Noël Coward. Contemplating the way that Williams converted the raw material of his life into drama, he saw a way forward. “Tennessee had shown me a dynamic example of the connection between art and life,” Inge wrote in his diary. “I had never known where to look for material. . . . Now I knew where to look for a play—inside myself.” The result was Farther Off from Heaven, a play based on his family; Williams liked the script and got it to Wood, who took Inge on as a client. The rest was Broadway history.) “I did promise to do your play,” Kazan told Williams. “I did because I wanted to do it, and I wanted to do it because I think it’s a beautiful play and a deep one. At that time I intended to get out of the Inge movie. . . . I couldn’t . . . because I had initiated the project. I had made him write it. . . . How the hell can you pull out of a project that has cost a writer that much work and thought? . . . I couldn’t. I didn’t.”
In the evening, after their drink, Williams called Kazan and, in a drunken paranoid outburst, berated him for his betrayal. “I’m furious at the way you spoke to me on the phone,” Kazan wrote to him the next day. “You haven’t a right in the world to infer that I’m lying to you. I have never lied to you. And have I ever asked you to crawl? Has our relationship ever dealt in pity? We have a clean relationship and I did my share to keep it clean.” He added, “I knew you were bound to think that I didn’t really like your play. I expected that, but I didn’t expect the insults.”
With William Inge, friend and rival
Just a year before, Williams had described Kazan as “a very charged man. He is capable of error, and it has happened, but when he is right, he is blinding right.” In this disagreement, the ugliest ever between them, Kazan was blindingly right. “Frankly, it appears to me that the loyalties in our relationship have run more from me to you than the other way,” he said, and spelled it out:
I stuck onto Baby Doll through the thick and thin of your indifferences and disappearing. . . . I stuck with Sweet Bird when you thought it was crap. I insisted on Gerry Page when you thought she was wrong. And I have taken for four years a whole campaign of vilification in the press to the effect that I was distorting your work. . . . I thought many times I should quit P. of A. But never seriously because I have always put you first. Then came Cassidy’s piece, and I began to think. It isn’t that I care what she thinks. I truly don’t. . . . I only cared that YOU were silent. And I was forced to think that really and truly you felt the same way.
In her review of Sweet Bird in the Chicago Tribune, the theater critic Claudia Cassidy had tarred Kazan with a now familiar canard, that his vulgar influence marred Williams’s poetic integrity: “The first and in part third are authentic Williams, while the inferior second act is shoddy compromise. Compromise with himself? With his director? Perhaps some of both.” The play, she wrote, was “split down the middle by the same opposing forces that ripped ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’—the antithetical theatrical convictions of the playwright and of the dominant director, Elia Kazan. The valid pressure on Williams’ characters comes from within. . . . Kazan’s pressure often bears down from the outside, crushing the victim like a contracting cage. Compared with the inner violence of a Williams play the outer fringes of superimposed fury can be anti-climactic, even cheap.”
Williams’s past weasel words—referring to the Broadway third act of Cat as “prostitution” and “Kazan’s ending”—had fanned the flames of misconception and inevitably trivialized Kazan’s subtle contributions to his work. In fact, Kazan’s psychological and structural acumen provided Williams with a safety net that rallied him out of his writing blocks, challenged his melodramatic excesses, chivied him to work for greater depth, and allowed his imagination to soar. But Williams’s artistic vanity would never allow him to acknowledge to the public or to himself just how much Kazan’s prowess had affected his work. The art belonged to Williams; the inadequacies belonged to someone else. When it came to the critics’ cavils about Kazan, Williams’s silence was deafening. “I was surprised to find that they all had gotten under my skin,” Kazan wrote of these accusations, adding that Cassidy’s Sweet Bird notice was “the last bit of water that flushes the bowl.” Now, in the face of Kazan’s withdrawal, Williams told the Times, “The charge that Kazan has forced me to rewrite my plays is ridiculous. . . . Kazan simply tried to interpret, honestly, what I have to say.” He went on, “The fact is, Kazan has been falsely blamed for my own desire for success.” “He should have said that earlier,” Kazan countered in the same article.
As it turned out, Williams’s passion for success was the tipping point in Kazan’s decision to say good-bye to him and to Broadway. (Sweet Bird of Youth was his last Broadway production.) He wrote to Williams:
I thought, Why does he want me to direct his plays? The answer: Because of some superstition that I bring commercial success. Which you terrifyingly want. But that is part of the same distasteful picture. Just as I can’t help but think you agree with Cassidy, I also think that you think of me as the person who can make your plays “go” and that you are willing to make some sacrifice in integrity and personal values to get the commercial success which I bring you. Well, Tennessee, fuck that! That is a hell of a humiliating position, and I don’t want any goddamn part of it. . . . I’m not going to break my neck, slough off Inge’s movie, do a half-ass job on Period of Adjustment only to be told in time, again, that I had misdirected your play into a hit. And then, to wait and wait for you to say something and wait for nothing. What the hell kind of position is that for a man? It’s not for me. . . . Get a new boy and a new relationship.
For more than a decade Kazan had been the premiere American director of stage and screen; by 1960, however, he had grown weary of being handmaiden to other people’s talent. “I wanted to be the unchallenged source,” he wrote in his autobiography. His crack at the screenplay for Wild River had piqued his interest in his own self-expression; it was further buoyed by the script he had fashioned from Ing
e’s prose treatment for Splendor in the Grass, which ultimately earned Inge the Academy Award for Best Screenplay. Walking away from Williams signaled a strategic volte-face in Kazan’s psyche, as well as his career. He was walking away from commercial theater, from the studios, from his life as an interpretive artist. In time, he would become a best-selling novelist. “I no longer gave a damn about the themes of other men,” he wrote in his autobiography. “How good it felt, despite the cold wind of Tennessee’s disappointment, to be free.” “Something has happened to me, no doubt,” he told Williams after things had calmed down. “And is that bad? I don’t think so. Something in me knows shock is necessary. Abrupt, jolting derailment. I’m sorry it all happened on your play.”
Kazan “vowed not to look back.” But how was Williams to look forward? To the Times, he insisted that for his future work there were other directors, in particular José Quintero, who was “just as brilliant as Kazan.” Behind the scenes, after he’d cooled down, he returned, cap in hand, to Kazan. “I want you back if there is any way to get you back for this play,” he wrote to him. “I’m confident that you are sincere about liking the play, and that this little play is one that you could give dignity and depth to, as well as a touching humor.” He went on, “I said I wouldn’t come creeping and crawling and I don’t think I am. I am only telling you that I am still your mystified friend, and will remain so whatever your response to this appeal is. Yes, it is an appeal because I do want you and need you for the play and, without a sob, I don’t think I am in any condition to have it without you. I’d rather put it away.” Williams’s pleading letter was signed “love,” as Kazan’s pugnacious one had been. “Please stay with me in spirit,” he asked Kazan.
Kazan did. “I think our friendship will survive this and I think we will work together again. We’re too close,” Kazan told him in another letter, adding, “I can understand why you’re sore at me. After all I said repeatedly I’d do it, and I was doing it, and then suddenly—. Well, I anticipated how you’d feel. And I think, all considered, you behaved very well. . . . I do think an awful lot of you, value you a lot, more than you know.”
At the time of their split, neither Kazan nor Williams knew how long their creative separation would last: it turned out to be forever. With the frankness that characterized their collaboration, Williams finally accepted the situation as blood under the bridge. “I don’t know, and I will never know, why you decided not to do the play,” Williams wrote Kazan some months after the break. “The message is that you made a big mistake and I suffered a big loss.” Williams continued:
Our association, personally and professionally, has always been a special one. Despite the fact that we had so much in common, but probably it’s the old story of conflicting egos of equally unsure people making a resentment and jealousy where there should have been faith and understanding and the brave use of peculiarly complementary talents for theatre, a mutual daring and a digging of each other’s sense of life.
We’re both full of hate and love, but let’s try not to hurt each other out of fear.
Don’t try to like me now. My psychic sickness and tensions, failure of analysis, self-facing and so forth, have made me at least temporarily impossible to like.
You are in the same boat, I would say, right now, although you have the comfort of a home-life, your devoted children, etc., while I must make out with two dogs and a Parrott and someone I love who is in a relation with me that may make a truly reciprocal love a psychological impossibility.
We are full of fear but also full of courage, and let’s concentrate on the latter, and what does it finally matter whether we do more than understand each other’s dilemma.
Williams remained true to Kazan in his fashion. When, in 1961, a year after the walkout, during rehearsals for The Night of the Iguana, Williams’s then director, Frank Corsaro, said in passing, “We young directors want to get away from Kazan,” Williams chimed in, “Not too far away, baby, until you young directors are sure as hell that you’re better.”
Although the trajectories of their careers would take them in different directions, Williams and Kazan never lost their fraternal bond. They would continue to correspond, to seek each other’s advice, to give notes on each other’s scripts, and to support each other in moments of personal tragedy. At the beginning of rehearsals for Period of Adjustment, Kazan sent Williams a letter of good wishes and enclosed a turkey feather. “You monster,” Williams joked in return, adding, “I wish I had an angel’s feather to enclose in this letter to you but all my feathers are gray ones.”
Period of Adjustment, directed by George Roy Hill, felt like a hit in Philadelphia; then, in New Haven, a frost settled “on more than the pumpkins,” according to Williams. “I crept around like that man who’d slaughtered 5,000,000 Jews in Nazi Germany, I drank a quart of liquor a day; and then the bleeding started. . . . Only Thornton Wilder and his sweet old maid sister were nice to us there,” he wrote to St. Just. Nonetheless, Period of Adjustment opened on Broadway on November 10, 1960. The New Yorker was the most virulent of the lukewarm press in its disapproval, referring to the play as “a turbid stew of immiscible ingredients.” The rest of the reviews were sufficient for Period of Adjustment to eke out 132 performances and to secure a movie sale. “I figure that I have had my day in the Broadway theatre,” Williams told St. Just. (Kazan “would have saved [it], if he’d staged it,” he wrote to Wood, months later in a postmortem.) When the time came to stage his next play, The Night of the Iguana, Williams’s name alone was, for the first time, no longer sufficient to guarantee a theater.
Back in 1959, Frank Corsaro had asked Williams to contribute a one-act play to be performed as part of a double bill with William Inge’s The Tiny Closet at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. Williams sent Corsaro a twenty-one-page sketch based on “The Night of the Iguana,” a short story he had written in 1946 inspired by his stint in Mexico after his heartrending breakup with Kip Kiernan. The story focused almost entirely on Miss Edith Jelkes, a hysterical, reclusive thirty-year-old Southern spinster who is living at a lonely, envious distance from the two other guests—gay writers—at a ramshackle Mexican hotel. Drawn to the older writer, Miss Jelkes intrudes into the couple’s solitary idyll:
“Your friend—” she faltered. “Mike?” “Is he the—right person for you?”
“Mike is helpless, and I am always attracted by helpless people.”
“But you,” she said awkwardly. “How about you? Don’t you need somebody’s help?”
“The help of God,” said the writer. “Failing that, I have to depend on myself.”
The older writer makes a clumsy pass at Miss Jelkes; she fights him off, but their brief botched sexual encounter severs “the strangling rope of her loneliness.” Her predicament is mirrored by the plight of an iguana, who has been cruelly caught and tethered under the hotel veranda and is finally cut free from his torture.
Corsaro found the characters two-dimensional—the writer was “a bit of a louse,” he recalled. He telephoned Williams to try to cajole him into giving them more depth. “As we’re talking, something is coming to me,” Williams replied. In Williams’s recalibration of the story into “an expression of my present, immediate psychological hassle,” as he described it to Corsaro, the tale became more about spiritual exhaustion than sexual frustration. Almost nothing of the original story ended up in the script, which Williams considered “more of a dramatic poem than a play.”
The Night of the Iguana deposits a defrocked-priest-turned-tour-guide, Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon, on a hilltop in a tropical Mexican paradise, positioned strategically between the awe of creation and the awe of disintegration—news of world war is reported from the radios of some jocund German guests (who did not appear in the short story), the world is at a spiritual tipping point, and so is the feverish Shannon. As he climbs the hill to the Costa Verde Hotel, he is on the verge of a second nervous breakdown. Down below him, a busload of unhappy ladies from a Texas
women’s college—“a football squad of old maids”—complain loudly about the tour, of “the underworlds of all places” that he has taken them on. Shannon is a kind of pilgrim, a “man of God, on vacation” who has lost his way, trying vainly to wrestle under control his lust for young girls and alcohol. Scrambling uphill for the solace of male company—the hotel’s owner, Fred Faulk—he is almost immediately walloped with more calamity: Fred has died, and Shannon comes face to face with Maxine, Fred’s predatory widow who has, in her newfound freedom, been entertaining herself with local youths.
In this revised drama, whose theme, according to Williams, is “how to live beyond despair and still live,” Shannon is the hysteric, and Miss Jelkes is transformed, for the purposes of dramatic debate, into the calm, saintly, androgynous Hannah Jelkes, a guest at Maxine’s hotel. “Ethereal, almost ghostly. She suggests a Gothic cathedral image of a medieval saint, but animated,” the stage directions say. Unlike the story’s Edith Jelkes, “a dainty teapot,” Hannah Jelkes is an intrepid Nantucket artist and traveling companion to the wheelchair-bound, ninety-eight-year-old Nonno, “the oldest living and practicing poet on earth” who is struggling to finish his last poem. Nonno, which means “grandfather” in Italian, was Merlo’s nickname for Reverend Dakin.