Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

by John Lahr

  194 “Sometimes I can make a virtue”: Williams to Elia Kazan, Feb. 24, 1950, L2, pp. 289–90.

  195 “like a radio”: As quoted in Williams to Elia Kazan and Molly Day Thacher, Mar. 23, 1950, WUCA.

  195 “I think if you start much later”: Kazan to Williams, undated, WUCA, permission granted.

  195 “I’d cut out Rosario”: In the final version, Rosario is an idea who never materializes; earlier drafts had him out of sight, unseen behind rose-colored curtains, but not internalized in this way.

  195 “Consider Gadg’s approach with great care”: Audrey Wood to Williams, Mar. 5, 1950, HRC.

  196 “I have just now completed”: Williams to Elia Kazan and Molly Day Thacher, Mar. 23, 1950, WUCA.

  196 “The most violent see-saw of my life!”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Apr. 3, 1950, HRC.

  196 “Dame Selznick”: Williams to Oliver Evans, Apr. 7, 1950, L2, p. 304.

  196 “When I think about Irene”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Apr. 11, 1950, ibid., p. 306.

  196 “Woman of the Year”: Audrey Wood to Irene Selznick, May 3, 1948, ISC. By 1950, Wood was singing a different tune. She wrote to Williams, “I am terribly and deeply concerned about Irene’s approach on a second venture, not again as a measure of her functioning as a producer but greatly so as her functioning as a human being. I don’t function well if compelled to work in what I would call a vacuum of acquiescence.” (Audrey Wood to Williams, Apr. 10, 1950, HRC.)

  196 “I place it, like Pilate”: Williams to Irene Selznick, Feb. 1949, L2, p. 311.

  196 lackluster but successful British-debut production: The production ran for 326 performances. Olivier rarely directed a contemporary play. Kenneth Tynan said that Olivier’s production showed the way “in which a good play can be scarred by unsympathetic and clumsy direction.”

  196 “I simply had to have a play”: Irene Selznick, A Private View (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), p. 329.

  197 “be as devastatingly candid”: Williams to Irene Selznick, Apr. 10, 1950, L2, p. 305.

  197 “Just hope with me that I am dead wrong”: Irene Selznick to Williams, Apr. 16, 1950, HRC.

  197 “To me, this is not a play”: Irene Selznick to Williams, Apr. 16, 1950, ISC.

  197 “Your letter knocked the goddam bottom”: Williams to Irene Selznick, Apr. 1950, L2, p. 311.

  197 “eventually happens to most lyric talents”: Ibid.

  197 “For the first time since this draft”: Williams to Irene Selznick, Apr. 1950, L2, p. 311.

  197 “Were I to see rather than read”: Irene Selznick to Williams, Apr. 16, 1950, HRC.

  197 “fully documented and justified”: Williams to Irene Selznick, Apr. 1950, L2, p. 313.

  198 “The great advance I have made”: Ibid.

  198 Cheryl Crawford: A co-founder of the Actors Studio, Crawford, who produced her first play in 1931, was also a founding member of the Group Theatre, for which she had produced plays by Clifford Odets, Maxwell Anderson, and John Howard Lawson; she had also produced Porgy and Bess, One Touch of Venus, and Brigadoon, among many Broadway musicals.

  198 “I don’t know if you realize”: Cheryl Crawford to Elia Kazan, Apr. 13, 1950, WUCA.

  198 Thacher told Williams what she thought: Molly Day Thacher to Williams, May 9, 1950, WUCA.

  199 “All-At-Sea, May, 1950”: Williams to Elia Kazan, May 1950, WUCA.

  199 “a grim, nihilistic mood”: Williams to Elia Kazan, June 16, 1950, L2, p. 323.

  199 “. . . I have never been anything with you”: Williams to Elia Kazan, May 30, 1950, WUCA.

  200 “clutching . . . for all it is worth”: Williams to Elia Kazan, June 16, 1950, L2, pp. 323–24.

  200 “Not very manly of me”: Ibid., p. 322.

  200 “My main concern, now”: Ibid, p. 324.

  201 “mixed feelings”: Irwin Shaw to Elia Kazan, June 19, 1950, WUCA.

  201 “Please keep after Gadg”: Williams to Cheryl Crawford, June 26, 1950, L2, p. 329.

  201 “Kazan is still not entirely sold on the play”: Williams to Oliver Evans, June 20, 1950, ibid., p. 327.

  201 “infinitely wrong”: N, July 23, 1950, p. 515.

  201 “like the battle front in Korea”: Williams to Maria Britneva, Aug. 8, 1950, FOA, p. 34.

  201 “Key West seems like heaven”: N, July 23, 1950, p. 515.

  201 “I have felt like a tired horse”: Williams to Audrey Wood and Cheryl Crawford, Aug. 15, 1950, L2, p. 343.

  202 “The play is hung like a tent”: Williams to Cheryl Crawford, Aug. 11, 1950, ibid., p. 342.

  202 “If we don’t get Magnani”: Audrey Wood to Williams, Mar. 5, 1950, HRC.

  202 “Magnani told a friend of mine”: Williams to Audrey Wood, July 1950, L2, p. 331.

  202 “She has the warmth and vigor”: Williams to Paul Bigelow, Aug. 3, 1950, ibid., p. 339.

  202 “She was looking quite marvelous”: Williams to Cheryl Crawford, Aug. 11, 1950, ibid., p. 342.

  202 “For an actor”: Quoted in Giancarlo Governi, Nannarella: Il romanzo di Anna Magnani (Rome: Minimum, Fax, 2008).

  203 “almost complete control over everything”: Williams to Cheryl Crawford, Aug. 11, 1950, L2, p. 342.

  203 “it would be very easy”: Ibid. In 1954, Magnani starred opposite Burt Lancaster in the Hal Wallis production of The Rose Tattoo.

  203 “the long dalliance with Gadg”: Williams to Robert Lewis, Oct. 10, 1950, L2, p. 352.

  203 “Tell Tennessee how badly I feel”: Elia Kazan to Audrey Wood, Aug. 12, 1950, HRC.

  203 “If Gadg were available”: Williams to Audrey Wood and Cheryl Crawford, Aug. 15, 1950, L2, p. 344.

  203 “On the sea, returning”: N, Sept. 1, 1950, p. 517.

  203 “I still believe that the flat stretches”: Williams to Audrey Wood and Cheryl Crawford, Aug. 15, 1950, L2, p. 344.

  203 “very impressed with it”: James Laughlin to Tennessee Williams, Nov. 3, 1950, Harvard.

  204 “The heart should have a permanent harbor”: Williams to Elia Kazan, Nov. 18, 1950, WUCA.

  204 “You wild, wild crazy thing”: LOA1, p. 687.

  204 royal road to knowledge was sexuality: “I doubt that anything did me more good as a writer than the many years of loneliness, of cruising around, making sudden and deep acquaintances, one after another, each leaving a new and fresh imprint on me,” Williams said. (As quoted in KAL, p. 496.)

  205 “To me the big bed”: LOA1, p. 696.

  205 “a female ostrich”: Ibid., p. 680.

  205 “slovenly deshabille”: Ibid., p. 685.

  205 “Are you in there, Mama?”: Ibid., p. 684.

  205 “spectral rose”: Williams, “Rose Tattoo,” HRC.

  205 instead of this external imposition of the ghostly: Also cut was the Parrott who mimics Rosario’s voice.

  205 “Each time is the first time”: LOA1, p. 661.

  205 “a pain like a needle”: Ibid., p. 659.

  205 “Serafina stares at the truck driver”: Ibid., p. 702.

  206 “I always cry”: Ibid., p. 703.

  207 “the grandson of the village idiot”: Ibid., p. 712.

  207 “Love and affection”: Ibid., p. 711.

  207 “You are simpatico, molto”: Williams, “Stornello,” HRC.

  207 “I like everything”: LOA1, p. 707.

  207 “profound unconscious response”: Ibid., p. 702.

  207 Serafina: (from inside the house): “Aaaaaahhhhhhhh!”: Ibid., p. 729.

  207 “the scene should be played”: Ibid., p. 733.

  207 “Che bel-la, che bel-la!”: Ibid., p. 734.

  208 “like a great bird”: Ibid.

  208 “I don’t know how he got in”: Ibid., p. 736.

  208 “abandoning all pretence”: Ibid.

  208 “How beautiful”: Ibid., p. 737.

  208 “I was very surprised”: Elia Kazan to Williams, undated, WUCA.

  208 “The urn is broken”: Williams, “Stornello,” HRC.

  208 “quietly and gravely as two children�
��: Ibid.

  208 “It would be a comic Mass”: Elia Kazan to Williams, undated, 1950, WUCA.

  209 “might be read as a massive autobiography”: KAL, p. 494.

  209 “little cave of consciousness”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Aug. 7, 1939, L1, p. 193.

  209 “forever his”: Gore Vidal, “Tennessee Williams: Someone to Laugh at the Squares With,” in Gore Vidal, Armageddon? Essays 1983–1987 (London: Andre Deutsch, 1987), p. 59.

  209 “A man, when he burns”: Williams, “Stornello,” HRC.

  209 “Holding the shirt above her head”: LOA1, p. 738.

  209 “Vengo, vengo, amore!”: “I’m coming, I’m coming, my love!”

  210 “something that is made to occupy”: Vidal, “Tennessee Williams,” p. 59.

  210 “my love-play to the world”: M, p. 162.

  210 “terribly afraid of critical reactions”: Williams to Cheryl Crawford, July 14, 1950, L2, p. 337.

  210 “It comes at a point in my life”: Williams to James Laughlin, Oct. 15, 1950, ibid., p. 353.

  211 “Critical reactions to the novel”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Nov. 26, 1950, HRC.

  211 “at a crucial point”: Williams to Cheryl Crawford, Mar. 3, 1951, L2, p. 374.

  211 “a gigantic task”: Audrey Wood to Williams, undated, HRC.

  211 “He has your aliveness”: Williams to Elia Kazan, undated, WUCA.

  211 “ ‘Mood’ is ‘doom’ spelt backwards”: Williams to James Laughlin, Nov. 7, 1950, L2, p. 357.

  211 “Probably means that I shall have to put”: Ibid.

  211 “Would Maureen Stapleton be all right?”: Williams to Cheryl Crawford, Aug. 11, 1950, ibid., p. 342.

  211 “Maureen must have been a victim”: Quoted in Maureen Stapleton and Jane Scovell, A Hell of a Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 82.

  212 “a World Series of readings”: Ibid., p. 83. “It was I who found Maureen Stapleton for the part,” Williams claimed in his Memoirs (p. 160).

  212 “Finally, I assisted her”: M, p. 162.

  212 “They seemed to want more assurance”: Arthur Gelb, “Frank Talk from an Actress,” New York Times, Feb. 18, 1951.

  212 “I don’t care if she turns into a deaf mute”: As quoted in Mike Steen, A Look at Tennessee Williams (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1969), p. 284.

  212 “The girl playing the lead”: Williams to Edwina Williams and Walter Dakin, Dec. 16, 1950, L2, p. 362.

  212 “the desire of an artist”: NSE, p. 63.

  212 “the Caesarean delivery”: Williams to Elia Kazan, Nov. 18, 1950, WUCA.

  212 “It was the most miraculous opening”: Ibid.

  213 “For some time I have suspected”: Ibid.

  214 “Four days now”: N, Jan. 30, 1951, p. 519.

  CHAPTER 4: FUGITIVE MIND

  215 “Once Kazan and I”: Williams to Bill Barnes, Dec. 23, 1973, LLC.

  215 “Now that the waiting is over”: Williams to Brooks Atkinson, Feb. 5, 1951, L2, p. 369.

  215 “intermittently satisfactory”: Richard Watts Jr., “Mr. Williams among the Sicilians,” New York Post, Feb. 5, 1951.

  215 “Play Isn’t Worthy of the Fine Acting”: John McClain, “Play Isn’t Worthy of the Fine Acting,” New York Journal-American, Feb. 5, 1951.

  215 “We believe that the world today”: Robert Coleman, “ ‘Rose Tattoo’ Is Thorny, Much Too Earthy,” New York Daily Mirror, Feb. 5, 1951.

  215 “His folk comedy about a Sicilian family”: Brooks Atkinson, “The Rose Tattoo,” New York Times, Feb. 5, 1951.

  215 “Behind the fury and uproar”: Brooks Atkinson, “Tattooing,” New York Times, June 3, 1951.

  216 “If I keep working on it”: Arthur Gelb, “Frank Talk from an Actress,” New York Times, Feb. 18, 1951.

  217 “Paw”: Maureen Stapleton and Jane Scovell, A Hell of a Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 86. In an opening-night note, Williams wrote to Stapleton, “Dearest Maureen, I do not say fuck the drama critics because fucking is too good for them. Love, Paw.” (Ibid., p. 87.)

  217 “improvements”: Tennessee Williams to Maureen Stapleton, Feb. 19, 1951, HRC.

  217 “You are good at public relations”: Ibid.

  217 “happiest experience in the theatre”: Williams to Cheryl Crawford, Mar. 3, 1951, L2, pp. 373–74.

  217 “the first time I have ever felt at home”: Ibid.

  217 “I am a little vexed”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Mar. 14, 1951, L2, p. 375. The play closed on October 27, 1951, after 306 performances; two days later, the tour began with Stapleton and Wallach in the leads.

  218 “This play was a radical departure”: Williams to Brooks Atkinson, Feb. 5, 1951, L2, p. 369.

  218 “Modern creative theatre”: Williams to Theatre Musicians Union, Aug. 3, 1951, ibid., p. 393.

  218 “only the barest glimpse”: NSE, p. 206.

  218 “Consequently many people missed”: Ibid.

  218 “If it had been a smash hit”: Williams to Irene Selznick, Feb. 27, 1951, L2, p. 370.

  219 “The big Chinese Red offensive”: CS, “Two on a Party,” p. 287.

  219 “lit by lightning”: LOA1, p. 465.

  219 “Dakin, my brother’s, number”: Williams to Maureen Stapleton, Feb. 19, 1951, HRC.

  219 “game”: KAL, p. 454.

  219 “It is part of Nixon’s job”: Williams to Elia Kazan, Aug. 23, 1952, WUCA.

  220 “the bright idea of property”: J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (Carlisle, Mass.: Applewood Books, 2007), p. 27.

  220 increase in consumption: David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Villard, 1993), p. 186.

  220 “Radio was abandoned”: Fred Allen, Treadmill to Oblivion (Rockville, Md.: Wildside Press, 2009), p. 239.

  221 “It was a bad time”: Nora Sayre, Previous Convictions: A Journey through the 1950s (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995), p. 112.

  221 “Do you realize”: Williams to Margo Jones, Dec. 1950, L2, p. 363.

  221 “A lizardic dormancy”: Arthur Miller, “Many Writers, Few Plays,” New York Times, Aug. 10, 1952.

  221 “a never-ending contest”: CS, “Two on a Party,” p. 292.

  221 “calling the pack to follow”: CP, “Cried the Fox,” p. 7.

  221 “Nothing can kill the beauty”: Williams to Oliver Evans, Mar. 31, 1951, L2, p. 378.

  221 “One of the very few advantages”: Ibid.

  222 “a fermenting new world”: Gore Vidal, The Golden Age (New York: Doubleday, 2000), p. 317.

  222 “The town has changed much”: Williams to Cheryl Crawford, Nov. 1950, L2, p. 359.

  222 Strange things were happening: David Aaronovitch, Voodoo Histories (New York: Riverhead, 2010), p. 111.

  222 “to investigate links”: Sayre, Previous Convictions, p. 274.

  222 “If you want to be against McCarthy”: Halberstam, Fifties, p. 54.

  222 “The anti-fag battalions”: Gore Vidal, The Essential Gore Vidal, ed. Fred Kaplan (New York: Random House, 1999), p. 964.

  222 “limp-wristers”: Michael S. Sherry, Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), p. 29.

  222 “time for TV”: Ibid., p. 30.

  222 “feminized”: Ibid.

  223 “was prudish enough”: Halberstam, Fifties, p. 273.

  223 Homophobia extended: Michael Paller, Gentleman Callers: Tennessee Williams, Homosexuality, and Mid-Twentieth-Century Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 62.

  223 “Fortunately property values”: Williams to Cheryl Crawford, Nov. 1950, L2, p. 359.

  223 “You can’t run a Puritan”: Williams to Josephine Healy, Feb. 27, 1951, Columbia.

  223 “the unmentionable article”: Williams to Brooks Atkinson, June 12, 1951, L2, p. 384.

  224 “I must tell you that I have lived”: Williams to Brooks Atkinson, Apr. 3, 1953, ibid., pp. 469–70.

  225 “Insensitivity”: Mervyn Rothstein, “Remembering
Tennessee Williams as a Gentle Genius of Empathy,” New York Times, May 30, 1990.

  225 “Oh Laura, Laura”: LOA1, p. 465.

  226 “the foul-minded and utterly stupid tyranny”: Williams to Jack Warner, Jerry Wald, and Charles K. Feldman, May 6, 1950, L2, p. 317.

  226 “to trace the visionary company of love”: LOA1, p. 467.

  226 “correct standards of life”: R. Barton Palmer and William Robert Bray, Hollywood’s Tennessee: The Williams Films in Postwar America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), p. 64.

  226 “sordid and morbid”: KAL, p. 433.

  226 “this story and this script”: Palmer and Bray, Hollywood’s Tennessee, p. 87.

  226 “The device by which he proves himself”: Ibid., p. 83.

  226 “The results were highly unsatisfactory”: Ibid.

  227 “I only want to do”: Ibid.

  227 “If Mr. Kazan’s solution was one”: Ibid., p. 86.

  227 “In effect, Breen was asking Kazan”: Ibid.

  227 “The rape of Blanche by Stanley”: Williams to Joseph Ignatius Breen, Oct. 29, 1950, L2, pp. 355–56.

  228 “The thing that makes this piece”: Palmer and Bray, Hollywood’s Tennessee, p. 87.

  229 “Stanley would be ‘punished’ ”: Ibid., p. 84.

  229 “Now, honey. Now, love”: LOA1, p. 564.

  229 “This game is seven-card stud”: Ibid.

  229 “Don’t you touch me”: Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (screenplay), HRC.

  229 “the primacy of moral order”: Palmer and Bray, Hollywood’s Tennessee, p. 91.

  230 “Joe, a very strange thing”: Ibid.

  230 Radio City Music Hall canceled: Elia Kazan, “Pressure Problem,” New York Times, Oct. 21, 1951.

  230 “When you speak of the primacy of moral values”: Elia Kazan to Martin Quigley, Aug. 16, 1951, WUCA.

  230 “You asked whose moral values”: Martin Quigley to Elia Kazan, Aug. 20, 1951, WUCA.

  231 “should take them at their word”: Elia Kazan to Jack Warner, July 20, 1951, WUCA.

  231 “They range from a trivial cut”: Kazan, “Pressure Problem.”

  232 “My picture had been cut”: KAL, p. 434. The article had been rewritten and tempered by Kazan’s wife, Molly Day Thacher.

  232 “The Legion of Decency had acted”: Ibid., p. 437.

  232 “Now an air of dissolution”: Ibid., p. 438.