Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh
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377 “Kubie didn’t seem to understand”: Williams to Elia Kazan, June 28, 1958, WUCA.
377 “A writer is always two beings”: Williams to Ted Kalem, undated, Columbia.
378 “It’s the work”: Williams to Brooks Atkinson, Sept. 2, 1959, BRTC.
378 “I think the arias”: Elia Kazan to Williams, May 20, 1958, WUCA.
378 “the potential of being a character”: Ibid.
378 “I think this is the most truly autobiographical play”: Elia Kazan to Jo Mielziner, Sept. 9, 1958, WUCA.
378 “The play is an expression”: Molly Day Thacher to Elia Kazan, May 29, 1958, WUCA.
379 “The PLOT of the play”: Ibid.
379 “He is surrounded by murderous forces”: Elia Kazan to Jo Mielziner, Sept. 9, 1958, WUCA.
379 “There, if ever I saw one”: Ibid.
380 “subjective scenery”: Ibid.
381 “Chance, you’ve got to help me”: LOA2, p. 217.
381 “PRINCESS: . . . I seem to be standing”: Ibid., p. 230.
381 “Grown, did you say?”: Ibid., p. 232.
381 “You’ve just been using me”: Ibid., p. 233.
381 “Frank . . . is so pitifully”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Sept. 27, 1959, HRC.
382 “the huddling-together”: LOA2, p. 235.
383 “the home of my heart”: Ibid., p. 207.
383 “Something’s got to mean something”: Ibid., p. 234.
383 “I don’t ask for your pity”: Ibid.
383 “big deal gamble”: Williams to Audrey Wood, May 7, 1958, HRC.
383 “if you want to wait”: Elia Kazan to Williams, May 20, 1958, KOD, p. 118.
383 “the most important thing”: Williams to Audrey Wood, June 6, 1958, LLC.
383 “Please help me not to be seduced”: Williams to Audrey Wood, June 6, 1958, HRC.
383 “what happens to Chance”: Sept. 2, 1958, KOD, p. 119.
384 “attention to his presence in town”: May 20, 1958, ibid., p. 117.
384 “the camera cutting from enormous close-ups”: Elia Kazan to Williams, Aug. 28, 1958, WUCA.
384 “stunt”: KAL, p. 544.
384 “I can’t think of any other director”: Williams to Audrey Wood, July 26, 1958, HRC.
384 “I am out”: Elia Kazan to Audrey Wood, Aug. 28, 1958, Columbia.
384 “I don’t really make deals with agents”: Elia Kazan to Williams, Aug. 28, 1958, Columbia.
384 “I do think he’s probably entitled”: Williams to Audrey Wood, July 26, 1958, HRC.
385 “I feel that this play needs him”: Williams to Cheryl Crawford, Sept. 4, 1958, HRC.
385 “He mustn’t try to screw me”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Aug. 31, 1958, HRC.
385 “for the inner qualities”: KAL, p. 545.
385 “Miss Page is not the kind of actress”: José Quintero, If You Don’t Dance They Beat You (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), p. 113.
385 “I think it may demand more power”: Williams to Cheryl Crawford, Aug. 13, 1958, HRC.
385 “The Princess is a pretty cosmopolitan character”: Williams to Audrey Wood, July 24, 1958, HRC.
385 “consanguinity”: Ibid.
386 “an air of great vulnerability”: Mike Steen, A Look at Tennessee Williams (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1969), p. 229.
386 “If Miss Page”: RBAW, p. 177.
386 “Stop it, stop it!”: M, p. 174.
386 “temporary obfuscation”: LOA2, p. 271.
386 “She was convinced”: KAL, p. 545.
387 “sweetly and genially smiling”: M, p. 174.
387 “now dreadfully ashamed”: Ibid.
387 “He doubted his own play”: KAL, p. 545.
387 “I think we have to go for broke”: Williams to Elia Kazan, Feb. 18, 1959, WUCA.
387 “You get the impression”: Steen, Look, p. 242.
388 “a close, undisturbed working relationship”: Williams to Elia Kazan, undated, Harvard.
388 “brought in to rewrite my work”: M, p. 174.
388 “rightful place”: Ibid.
388 “O.K. I’ll play it cool”: Williams to Elia Kazan, undated, Harvard.
388 “correct”: Ibid.
388 “The sick fury”: Ibid.
390 “You know how suspicious”: Williams to Elia Kazan, undated, Columbia.
390 “A sort of distortion was going on”: KAL, p. 546.
390 “the most truly powerful and moving scene in the play”: Williams to Elia Kazan, undated, 1959, LLC.
390 “A director of your skill”: Ibid.
391 “was more moving”: Elia Kazan to Williams, undated, Columbia.
391 “shallow”: Elia Kazan to Williams, undated, 1959, LLC.
392 “If this be blockbustering”: Walter Kerr, “Sweet Bird of Youth,” New York Herald Tribune, Mar. 11, 1959.
392 “One of his finest dramas”: Brooks Atkinson, “Portrait of Corruption,” New York Times, Mar. 11, 1959.
392 “A play of overwhelming force”: Richard Watts Jr., New York Post, Mar. 11, 1959.
392 “a tigress with the voice of a trumpet”: Kerr, “Sweet Bird of Youth.”
392 “Kazan was marvelous”: Williams to Brooks Atkinson, Mar. 27, 1959, BRTC.
392 “He thought the writing”: Williams to Elia Kazan and Jo Mielziner, Nov. 16, 1958, WUCA.
393 “Pride and dignity”: Williams to Kenneth Tynan, undated, HRC.
393 “None of Mr. Williams’ other plays”: Kenneth Tynan, “Ireland and Points West,” The New Yorker, Mar. 21, 1959, pp. 97–102.
393 “My complaint is that you didn’t listen”: Williams to Kenneth Tynan, undated, LLC.
393 “dismayed and alarmed”: Tynan, “Ireland and Points West.”
393 “to be somebody—anybody—else”: Kenneth Tynan, The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan, ed. John Lahr (London: Bloomsbury, 2001), p. 9.
393 “Something always blocks me”: LOA2, p. 175.
394 “Still a non-smoker”: Tynan, Diaries, p. 15.
394 “Big Daddy rewritten”: Williams to Kenneth Tynan, undated, 1959, LLC.
394 “You were obviously totally alienated”: Williams to Kenneth Tynan, undated, 1959, LLC.
394 “As an artist grows older”: Williams to Max Learner, undated, 1959, Harvard. About his critics, Williams continued to Lerner, “I think these detractors, so curiously impassioned in their attacks, far more impassioned than they could be if provoked by dullness, tedium, by that which is ordinary or pedantic—don’t really know what they want. They pay homage to foreign theatre, mostly French. But when you examine their reviews even of Giraudoux, Camus and Anouilh, you are disturbed by a response which is more intellectual than emotional. And isn’t theatre always addressed, first of all, to that part of us, wherever, whatever it is, that is capable of warm feeling?”
394 “You are tired”: Williams to Elia Kazan, undated, WUCA.
394 “the rule of the straight line”: Williams to Elia Kazan, undated, WUCA.
395 “back alone up the beanstalk”: LOA2, p. 233.
395 “Are you driven and compelled”: Williams to Elia Kazan, Mar. 28, 1959, WUCA.
395 “You are giving me the same advice”: Williams to Elia Kazan, undated, WUCA.
395 “freedom from pressure”: Williams to Audrey Wood, May 7, 1959, HRC.
395 “She has the Barrymore madness”: Williams to Lady St. Just, July 8, 1959, FOA, pp. 161–62.
396 “like crazy”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Oct. 30, 1959, HRC.
396 “Something suddenly triggers my nerves”: Williams to Lilla Van Saher, Oct. 20, 1959, HRC.
396 “Oh, God, Gadg, I don’t know”: Williams to Elia Kazan, undated, HRC.
CHAPTER 7: KOOKHOOD
397 “Perhaps my heart has died in me”: Williams to Hermione Baddeley, 1963, HRC.
397 “She had great honesty”: “Playwrights: Unbeastly Williams,” Newsweek, June 27, 1960. According to Gilbert Maxwell, Williams seemed discombobulated by Barrymore’s death: he arrived in snowy New Y
ork wearing cotton slacks and no jacket, and he forgot the keys to his New York apartment, which had to be retrieved from his maid in Harlem. (Gilbert Maxwell, Tennessee Williams and Friends: An Informal Biography (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1965), p. 276.)
397 “Personality Deb No. 1”: Mervin Block, “The Diana Barrymore Tragedy,” Chicago Tribune, Jan. 26, 1960.
397 “Any time she wants to stop fooling around”: Brooks Atkinson, “Ivory Branch Opens at the Provincetown,” New York Times, May 25, 1956.
397 “I repeat my vow”: Diana Barrymore and Gerold Frank, Too Much, Too Soon (London: Muller, 1957), p. 303.
398 “I don’t mean this in a sacrilegious way”: Dakin Williams, “Last Days,” LLC.
398 “You can make a career”: Beatrice Washburn, “D. B.: Bewitching,” Miami Herald, June 1, 1959.
399 The Poem of Two: Williams to the Editors of Time, Feb. 10, 1960, HRC. The material resurfaced years later in The Red Devil Battery Sign.
399 “1960 is our year”: Maxwell, Tennessee Williams and Friends, p. 264.
399 “Not knowing anything”: D. Williams, “Last Days,” LLC.
399 “She flashed it everywhere”: George Keathley, unpublished Ms., JLC.
399 “held no surprise”: M, p. 177.
399 “I thought Diana”: Ibid., pp. 176–77.
399 “She read the part with a violence”: Williams to Lucy Freeman, Feb. 27, 1963, LLC.
399 “the most heart-breaking point”: D. Williams, “Last Days,” LLC.
399 “My hatred for Kazan burns black”: Ibid.
400 “The only strong men I had met”: Barrymore and Frank, Too Much, p. 301.
400 “Just your brother matters to me”: D. Williams, “Last Days,” LLC.
400 two other friends: Marion Vaccaro and Dr. Hugh Hyatt.
400 “It was an idyll”: D. Williams, “Last Days,” LLC.
400 “If you don’t watch out”: Maxwell, Tennessee Williams and Friends, p. 283.
400 “sympathetic attachment”: Williams to Brooks Atkinson, Mar. 1960, BRTC.
400 “Tom and I have talked of many things”: D. Williams, “Last Days,” LLC.
401 “I remember her wearing”: M, p. 177.
401 “Diana loved me as a writer”: Williams to Lucy Freeman, undated, LLC.
401 “deeply disturbed”: M, p. 177.
401 “I didn’t think she would take it so badly”: Ibid.
401 “The two of them”: Maxwell, Tennessee Williams and Friends, p. 266.
401 “It was half in jest”: Ibid.
402 “sinking into [a cavern] gradually”: LOA2, p. 272. Williams wrote to his then agent Bill Barnes about his memoirs: “I have a new title for them. ‘Flee, Flee This Sad Hotel’—it’s a quote from a poem by Anne Sexton, who borrowed it from Rimbaud. Of course a hotel is a metaphor for my life, and flight from it—if not an impulse—at least an imminence.” (Williams to Bill Barnes, May 31, 1973, HRC.)
402 “The human heart would never pass”: LOA2, p. 322.
402 “isn’t my best”: Williams to Cheryl Crawford, undated, BRTC.
402 “to cast a kinder shadow”: “Playwrights: Unbeastly Williams.”
402 “the nightmare merchant of Broadway”: Ted Kalem, “The Angel of the Odd,” Time, Mar. 9, 1962.
402 “only violent melodramas”: Ibid.
402 “After my analysis”: David Levin, “Desperation,” World-Telegram and Sun, Aug. 20, 1960.
402 “what have been called my ‘black’ plays”: “Playwrights: Unbeastly Williams.”
402 “more belief in the truth”: Williams to Elia Kazan, undated, WUCA.
403 “We all have to be smart and lucky”: LOA2, p. 321. “Period of Adjustment is so far below Mr. Williams’s standard that it proves nothing one way or another,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in the New York Times Book Review (Nov. 26, 1961). “His heart is not in this mediocre jest.”
403 “one of those rare people”: LOA2, p. 240.
403 “a girl with no looks”: Ibid., p. 312.
403 “unintentionally unfair”: Williams to Elia Kazan, Mar. 1963, WUCA.
403 “very often . . . misjudge Frank”: Audrey Wood to Williams, June 11, 1963, HRC.
403 “It becomes difficult to distinguish”: Charlotte Chandler, The Girl Who Walked Home Alone: Bette Davis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), p. 233.
403 “he was an angel all during rehearsals”: Williams to Elia Kazan, June 1959, WUCA.
403 “Frank made it clear”: Ibid.
403 “I think Frank would be reluctantly willing”: Williams to Christopher Isherwood, Dec. 27, 1959, Huntington.
404 “in voices turned softer”: CP, “A Separate Poem,” pp. 80–81.
404 “When we speak to each other”: Ibid.
404 “The Horse is on pills”: Williams to Lady St. Just, August 10, 1960, FOA, p. 165.
405 “of passing out stoned”: Williams to Robert MacGregor, 1963, LLC.
405 “To beg a question”: Frank Merlo, unpublished poem, 1960, THNOC.
405 “looking rather shaky”: Arthur Gelb, “Williams and Kazan and the Big Walk-Out,” New York Times, May 1, 1960.
405 most important theatrical collaboration: Only Lloyd Richards’s collaboration with August Wilson approaches the depth and import of Williams and Kazan’s.
406 “sight unseen and unread”: Audrey Wood to Tennessee Williams, Oct. 16, 1959, HRC.
406 “I tried my best”: Arthur Gelb, “Williams and Kazan and the Big Walk-Out,” New York Times, May 1, 1960. “I offered to do the play when I was through with my movie, but Tennessee was not willing to wait till then,” Kazan told the New York Times.
406 “signal that I preferred working with Inge”: KAL, p. 595. “In my heart it is hard for me to like any playwright who is still writing plays. Miller, yes! Inge, sometimes . . . an ugly effect of the competitive system. They have to stun me with splendor that drives vanity out!” (Williams to Audrey Wood, Aug. 1955, L2, p. 592.)
406 “Tennessee had shown me”: RBAW, p. 222.
406 “I did promise to do your play”: Elia Kazan to Williams, Apr. 22, 1960, KOD, pp. 134–35.
406 “I’m furious at the way”: Ibid., p. 134.
408 “You haven’t a right in the world”: Ibid., pp. 134–35.
408 “a very charged man”: Whitney Bolton, “Williams Talks on Violence,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 1, 1959.
408 “Frankly, it appears to me”: Elia Kazan to Williams, Apr. 22, 1960, KOD, pp. 135–36.
408 “The first and in part third are authentic Williams”: Claudia Cassidy, “Some Heady Virtuosity Even Tho Williams’ ‘Bird’ Flies Half Mast,” Chicago Tribune, Apr. 26, 1959.
409 “prostitution”: CWTW, p. 72.
409 “Kazan’s ending”: See KAL, p. 544. Also, see “Note of Explanation,” “Act Three (Broadway Version),” in Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Other Plays (London: Penguin Classics, 1976), p. 107.
409 “I was surprised to find”: Elia Kazan to Williams, undated, Columbia.
409 “The charge that Kazan has forced me”: Gelb, “Williams and Kazan.”
409 “I thought”: Elia Kazan to Williams, Apr. 22, 1960, KOD, p. 137.
410 “I wanted to be the unchallenged source”: KAL, p. 660.
410 “I no longer gave a damn”: Ibid., p. 596.
410 “Something has happened to me”: Elia Kazan to Williams, undated, WUCA.
410 “vowed not to look back”: KAL, p. 596.
410 “just as brilliant as Kazan”: Gelb, “Williams and Kazan.”
410 “I want you back”: Williams to Elia Kazan, undated, WUCA.
410 “Please stay with me in spirit”: Williams to Elia Kazan, undated, WUCA.
410 “I think our friendship will survive”: Elia Kazan to Williams, undated, Columbia.
411 “I don’t know”: Williams to Elia Kazan, undated, Harvard.
412 “We young directors”: Williams to Cheryl Crawford, 1961, LLC.
412 “You mon
ster”: Williams to Elia Kazan, undated, Harvard. In 1962, when Kazan became co-artistic director of the newly formed Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, intended, in the early fizzy months of the Kennedy presidency, to be a national theater, Williams was one of two living American playwrights Kazan asked to inaugurate the enterprise. “We really need your relationship, BADLY,” Kazan wrote to him. “It won’t be much of a repertory-theatre-aspiring-to-be–a-National Theatre if we don’t do your plays. And we just must do one the very first season, straight off number one or number two. . . . We want to make Lincoln Center, among other things, a place where a Williams play can be seen every year, the ‘successes’ and the most far-out things you can write, a place where these pieces live by being constantly played. . . . It would be a stunning blow to us, to me, if we don’t get some of your new plays and all of your old ones. . . . We’ll do right by them.” (Elia Kazan to Williams, Apr. 25, 1962, Columbia.) Williams declined. “What I’m doing now is a reflection of how I am now, which is so far from well,” he wrote back. (Williams to Elia Kazan, undated, Harvard.) Arthur Miller accepted; his play After the Fall opened the theater.
412 “on more than the pumpkins”: Williams to Lady St. Just, Dec. 25, 1960, FOA, p. 169.
412 “I crept around like that man”: Ibid.
412 “a turbid stew of immiscible ingredients”: John McCarten, “Tennessee Tries a Tender Pitch,” The New Yorker, Nov. 19, 1960.
412 a movie sale: Released by MGM in 1962, directed by George Roy Hill, and starring Jane Fonda and Tony Franciosa.
412 “I figure that I have had my day”: Williams to Lady St. Just, Dec. 25, 1960, FOA, p. 169.
412 “would have saved”: Williams to Audrey Wood, undated, HRC.
412 no longer sufficient: JLI with Frank Corsaro, 2011, JLC.
413 “ ‘Your friend—’ ”: CS, “The Night of the Iguana,” p. 243.
413 “the strangling rope of her loneliness”: Ibid., p. 229.
413 “a bit of a louse”: JLI with Frank Corsaro, 2011, JLC.
413 “As we’re talking”: Ibid.
413 “an expression of my present”: Williams to Frank Corsaro, May 13, 1960, Morgan.
413 “more of a dramatic poem”: CWTW, p. 86.
414 “a football squad of old maids”: LOA2, p. 331.
414 “the underworlds of all places”: Ibid., p. 397.
414 “man of God, on vacation”: Ibid., p. 378.