Follies of God

by James Grissom

  I read it back to him.

  Tenn handed me several folded pieces of paper. “Type those notes when you get a chance,” he told me. “It’s television work.” The work was not toward some play for television, but observations he had made of things recently seen on TV—“sparks,” he called them, material for the fog.

  I found last night, in an episode of Hazel, in the gait of Shirley Booth, the intention of Amanda Wingfield. [Booth had assumed the role of Amanda on CBS Playhouse some fifteen years prior to this note, but Tenn claimed no memory of that production.]

  The voice of Polly Holliday is the voice of so many aunts and fine ladies of my childhood, joined in guilds and societies and secrets and resentments, and I could follow her to a resolution.

  I can endow, if I wish, the theater and the work I create for the theater, with the power and the love I once held for it.

  I put the notes aside and turned to Tenn, who was snapping his fingers at me.

  “Do you have the notes on the Mexican artists?” Tenn asked me. “The ones I studied for Camino Real?” I reached into my backpack and found the notes and I read them to Tenn. When I was finished, he paused, thought, then looked at me.

  “I think there might be a way,” he said, slowly and seriously, “that we can apply all of that to a play for Geraldine. Or a memoir.”

  Geraldine Page had read Summer and Smoke several times before she met with Tenn to discuss the possibility of playing Alma. Page admitted to José Quintero that she had seen the Broadway production twice, cringing each time at what she called its “lost possibilities.” My time with Page was severely limited, lasting less than half an hour, and it took place backstage at the Promenade Theater on the Upper West Side, where she was appearing in Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind. I was in New York for only a few days, catching some plays and seeing some friends and beginning to craft plans to move to the city. I saw the play and, when it was over, asked a theater staff member where I might wait to see Miss Page. The young man nonchalantly waved me toward a door in the lobby, and once I opened the door I was face-to-face with Geraldine Page, still in costume, preparing to head to her dressing room, and a bit startled at my sudden arrival. I told her that I had met Tennessee Williams three years earlier and that I had something from him that I wanted to read to her. Page’s eyebrows shot up to her hairline and she let out a gruff laugh, but she looked around for some chairs for us and she sat and looked at me, her demeanor sending forth the message “Proceed.” She put one of her expressive hands under her chin and she stared at me. I got about two sentences into the notes Tenn had dictated to me about her when she suddenly and viciously grabbed the page from my hand. “I’ll read it myself!” she said, but I saw that she was crying, was terribly moved, and as she read, her hand found mine and she caressed it. Over and over as she read, she said, “Why? Why?” She finished reading and looked at me and began talking, telling me her reactions to what Tenn had said and what she thought I needed to know.

  I could not write anything down as she spoke, because she never let go of my hand.

  Geraldine Page was an accumulator of ideas and images and memories, and she often joked that her mind was as cluttered as her home, and both were stuffed with interesting and loved and rare things. Page hated inactivity, idle minds or chatter, conversations for which there was no point or theme or purpose. Tenn thought that she possessed, along with Marian Seldes, one of the strongest obsessions with time he had ever encountered, but Quintero disagreed with that assessment. “She wasn’t obsessed with time running out, or time having its way with her,” he told me, “but she did believe that every single thing, every moment, should serve toward some bigger purpose, so she was prone to asking a room of people what they were up to, and really mean it, and really want an answer. You could have drinks and talk about things, but the conversation needed to be, had to be, intelligent and open and about something.”

  She had no patience or sympathy for unintelligent, unexamined people or situations, and in that first encounter, Page let Tenn know that Summer and Smoke, on Broadway, had been two of her least favorite things: thoughtless and unclear. “And I agreed with her,” Tenn told me. Page admired Tenn’s extensive stage directions in the play’s script, and she marveled at his use of language. “Trust me,” she told me, “I knew all about Alma—as much as I could at that age. But I felt that Tennessee was acting as both the writer and the director of his play. I came to feel this way even more as I read more of his plays, but I tried to let him know that what made Alma was entirely here”—she pointed to her heart—“and here,” as she pointed to her head. “It’s not in her hands or her hair or the color of her dress or the way she holds her prayer book. There was so much projection and labeling in both the script and the direction of that play. It couldn’t breathe. It didn’t move. It was so cloudy and heavy and thick with symbolism and ‘meaning’ that you lost the whole thing.”

  Quintero and Page formed a partnership of sorts, because both believed in the play and lamented the abuse it had endured in its initial production, and both saw in it the potential to showcase their talents. “That play allowed us both to grow as artists,” Quintero told me, “and we both knew that would happen when we pursued it. We had both looked at the Margo Jones production slack-jawed with shock. It was a very bad stock production, and I began to think of casting it properly and directing it almost immediately. When I found Geraldine, I knew precisely how the production would look and sound and be received.”

  From Tenn’s notes on Page:

  She suffered nothing except the insult and negligence that is attached to all matters of love and attraction. She had no fear of beginning, of jumping off where she should, over and over, to get to where she needed to be. I would like to emulate her in her impatience with delusion. I delude myself all the time, still, and it offers me no reward. I do not believe that she ever saw the benefit of delusion, and so never suffered its various harms.

  Nearly every actress I came to meet in the course of finding the people who had mattered to Tennessee Williams would ask who else was on the list, who else was on that menu from the Court of Two Sisters. They wanted to know what Tennessee had said about them, about the other talent in the arena, and they did not wait to share their own opinions of those named. The exception was Geraldine Page. She did not ask for names or the comments of others, and she did not care to hear how I had come to the Promenade Theater to find her. She responded immediately to what I had brought her and sought to help me find out something about the writer with whom I had spent time; and yet she, more than any other actress in Tenn’s index of follies, was the one others wished to discuss, jumped to praise, tried to understand.

  Page’s talent has been described in a variety of ingenious ways. Her work on a part has been compared to photography, in which the tray of chemicals is the play or the various intentions of the playwright, the director, and the designers, and the photographic paper is the actress, who surrenders to the liquid and a sharp image magically and suddenly appears. Her emotional intensity has been compared to a singer capable of holding a particular note for an astonishingly long time, leaving an audience on edge, wondering if the artist can survive such a commitment, then marveling when the note ends and a new note is pursued, held, conquered. Her impossibly high standards of conduct and creativity have led her to be compared to any number of wild and ferocious animals, the female of said species all too eager to maim or kill those who would trespass on her grounds or usurp her authority.

  After studying numerous film stars, including Bette Davis and one of Tennessee’s favorites, Ruth Chatterton, Geraldine Page felt comfortable in applying the armor she needed to become Alexandra Del Lago of Sweet Bird of Youth, in both the 1959 play and the 1962 film, for which she sat for this photograph. (illustration credit 13.2)

  “Her ego was wrapped securely in getting the part right and serving the playwright,” Elia Kazan told me. “I respected that about her and I thought very highly of her gif
ts, but I did not find her easy or terribly inspiring when we worked together on Sweet Bird of Youth.” He found her courteous and professional, but also set in her ways. “She knew the character of the Princess before we ever had a rehearsal. She understood her emotionally; she knew where the scars were and how the heart operated and what the eyes saw and did not see. All of that was set, and all of that was, for the most part, true and correct to the play. She only lacked confidence in her appearance, in her movement. She did not believe herself to be beautiful or to have the composure—or should I say ‘comportment’?—of a movie star, of a grand lady who got what she wanted.”

  Tenn was helpful in that regard, describing the physical movements of the actresses “born to drama and convinced that the world had been brought into existence to ease their passage toward perfumed comfort,” and showed her how they moved. Tenn’s time with Tallulah Bankhead and Miriam Hopkins showed him how nearsighted actresses, too vain to be seen wearing eyeglasses, sidled against men or railings or walls to wend their way about town or a party or a premiere. “Their confidence was such that they did not hesitate one bit,” Tenn remembered. Their creamy beauty and smooth transitions would lead them wherever they must go, and it was irrelevant that they had no idea whom they were passing. Their importance was so great that they would be sought out, as they always were. Tenn stood with Page and showed her the walk, slightly somnambulistic, slow, sure. “I always thought of what Geraldine did with her walk to be Lillian Gish by way of Rossetti’s Blessed Damozel right through to John Everett Millais’s great painting Ophelia,” he laughed, remembering that Page listened to his references, then waved him away. “Tennessee always gave too much too quickly and too indiscriminately,” she remembered. “His ideas were fulsome and rich and perfect, but he had no concept of how I might be working or thinking or feeling, and he would just pile on all of this stuff. He couldn’t understand that I—or any other actress—might want to discover some things on our own. We weren’t there solely to emulate images or visions he had entertained.”

  Kazan took Page’s natural impatience and told her to use it to convey the imperious rush that surrounded all of Alexandra Del Lago’s activities. “She literally jumped, as if with joy, when I gave her that direction,” Kazan remembered. “It was so perfect and immediate and it altered her performance. Blind and beautiful and willful and in a hurry. Seeking to be sated at all times. I think that may have been all that I said to her in that production. The rest was hair, lips, dresses, sounds. I had to show her how to yelp in a way that was sexy rather than shrill. Everything else was some sort of covenant between her and Tennessee.”

  “One doesn’t teach Geraldine Page anything,” Tenn told me. “You do your work and you are aware that she is observing you. She picks and studies and ponders what you do and what you didn’t do and comes away with an idea or a philosophy or the knowledge of something, but she doesn’t share it with you, unless it can be transmitted through a part, unless she can show you through a gesture or an act she has imagined for a character.”

  “I do not like to talk,” Page told me, as if to explain her reticence at my questions, even though she gave me her address and her phone number and asked me to call her as I progressed with whatever it was this project might turn into. “You have to hold on to what you have and what you’ve picked up,” she explained. “I was never one to talk about what I’d done or seen. I guess I never thought anyone cared what I thought about things, and I came to believe, as I think most shy and solitary people do, that things increased in value if they were hidden and kept in a special place and brought out at special times. I mean, you don’t put up a wreath or a tree until it’s Christmas, and you’re presumably celebrating something big and important. It means something when the tree goes up and the candles are lit and people are in the house. You do something like that every Tuesday and it soon comes to mean nothing. It’s a joke or some desperate act of a sick mind to hold on to all the Christmases of the world and time. I feel that way about memories or images or experiences: they have their place and their time, and our responsibility toward them is to keep them special and to use them well. All I have, really, to bring to a role is that history of experience, those stories.”

  Tenn wrote in his notes:

  In a box I have all of these snapshots of my life, old, sepia-toned photographs and newer, stiffer instant photographs of parties with friends I’ve often forgotten. In another box I have old toys and ornaments that can transport me to Missouri or Mississippi or Louisiana, to 1923 or 1937 or 1943. There is an album on which one can find “Little Brown Jug” and I play this song on this album and I can smell citrus and remember a cool breeze rising up a hill full of lupine. There is a crocheted doily made by my mother and I can look at the thread and remember her hands moving as she made it, and I hold it in my hand and here is my mother and what year is it? Here is a spool of thread, almost used up, old, worthless, but I took this spool of thread with me thinking that it could be unraveled and hold me to a place where I did not always find love, but where I always felt somewhat wise in searching for it.

  Geraldine Page made Tenn aware of thread, an artistic thread that connected all artists. “I suppose it runs through all of us,” he told me, “and from this psychic fabric we create what we create when we create it. It is husbanded by us, shared by us. We often abuse it; we far more frequently craft it into and onto items that hold no shape or offer any comfort, so we pull it apart again and wait for a receptive fabric or canvas into which we can press it. Again and again. Over and over.”

  Tenn had me read these notes, both scribbled and typed, several times, asking me to edit and revise sentences as I went along. “What I want to impress on you,” he told me, “is the need to husband your talent, which is housed in such a fragile and fickle vessel. We destroy ourselves every day, and then we rebuild. Some of us can survive this damage and use it to some good effect—through work or sympathy or charity or awareness. I do not have this ability, and my failure to be a good steward of my talent led to many clashes with Geraldine, who is a fearsome guardian of her work, of her mental theater, from which emerge her characters, which are crafted from something I can only call majestic. Hers is a titanic talent; her vision is frightening—I don’t think that I could withstand being in its line for very long. She has an intellect that I would match against that of anyone else in the world, and it is attached to a talent that is something like a ton of dynamite bearing a one-inch wick. It explodes frequently and beautifully, and it is lethal to be stupid in its path.”

  Writers, Tenn explained, “create scratches on pieces of paper. We hope and we dream. We try to locate those moments in our life when things happened and we were left stranded and stunned and wondering and asking ‘Why?’ To these scratches some people bring blood and flesh and perfume picked up from having stood in places long enough to catch an essence, a memory, of life. Geraldine Page poured blood and flesh into my pages—and the pages of others—and left me wondering ‘Why?’ ”

  Tenn asked me to type up his notes, and I began working on the typewriter he had borrowed. The ribbon was new and it blurred and several keys stuck, so typing was slow and tortured, and the table on which the machine sat wobbled as I continued. Tenn remarked that it was growing late; it was time for dinner. Perhaps room service should be called. I did not know if he intended to include me in his plans, but he had me look at the menu for what I might want. He was aware of my surprise, because he told me that although it was late, he had other things to say about Geraldine Page, and he wanted me to stay and handle those notes.

  Tenn spoke into the night about Page’s performances. “If I knew how,” he told me, “if I had the gifts of the greatest magicians or sages or warlocks, I would wish that I could transport you to the theaters all over the world in which I’ve seen the great performances.”

  On an index card stuck into the corner of Tenn’s bureau mirror was typed the following: “The most exquisite prayer in the world is the m
emory of beauty, of art created and shared in space and air and time in which we lived, for a moment, within its reach.” It was attributed to Luchino Visconti, with whom Tenn had worked on the film Senso, whom Tenn had loved, and to whom he had made one of his desperate phone calls, in the supernal hours, alone and mad, looking for a release, a reason to continue.

  “Visconti gave me back my life more times than I can recall,” Tenn told me. “He was the first artist I ever encountered who was also regal, both of carriage and of ancestry. Visconti had a nobility in his pursuit of art that I’ve never encountered in anyone else. An emulation of him would serve as a great line of intention to place at your feet. His passions—for life, for work, for people, for spirits—were large and grand and generous, but they never got him away from his purposes. When I was at my most desperate—in person, by phone, by wire, by letter—he always calmly put me back into the position of postulant, talking about experiences we’ve shared, the prayer of art: The nights with Pasolini. Callas onstage. Laurette Taylor. Jean Cocteau. Jean Renoir. E. M. Forster. I told him of the actresses I’d shared air with—women with whom he’d never shared proximity.”

  Luchino Visconti, stage and film director with whom Tennessee had what he called a “close and sweet relationship.” Visconti taught Tennessee how to analyze his characters—from their place of birth to their dialect to the style of shoes they might wear. “No one was safe around him,” Tennessee said. “He saw through every layer a person might have.” (illustration credit 13.3)

  Tenn described for Visconti (and for me) the sight of Geraldine Page, in a play called Mid-Summer, arriving home late in the evening, exhausted, her face and ankles bulging from weight and fatigue and despair, her eyes blurry, the lid of one eye twitching, an alabaster hand rising to hold it down, keep it still. The woman is met by her children, who are happy to see her home from work and bearing food. The children tear into the food, ripping apart bread and meat and fruit, and the mother laughs and sighs, her hand over her heart, her lips clamped tight to ward off tears. She needs and wants the food, but her maternal instinct, her large and savage heart, recognize the need to share, so she gives it to her children, who then clamber off to bed, sated, calmed for one more day, assured of survival; and Page, as this mother, looks into the empty bag, sniffs it, imagines what might have been eaten, looks off into the distance, and the scene ends.