Follies of God

by James Grissom

  “I cannot tell you the name of that play’s writer,” Tenn told me. (Her name was Vina Delmar, and the director was Paul Crabtree; both are as lost to the rubble of time as the theater, the Vanderbilt, in which the play ran.) “I cannot even tell much about the rest of the play, these poor people in a hotel room at the turn of the century. But I can tell you about Geraldine Page’s posture and her voice and the strangled cry she stifled when she was sad when she couldn’t be, and which she let out when she needed to get something that might mean another hour of life, such as it was.”

  Tenn had believed that actors were incapable of thought in their acting, that perhaps they were discouraged from displaying this action in their work. American actors, he felt, demonstrated, indicated, spoke, moved, and all intentions, all motivations, all desires had been worked out prior to performance—in study with an acting coach, perhaps, or in discussions with a therapist. Nothing, however, appeared to Tenn to happen in real time in that shared space. This began to change for him with Taylor in The Glass Menagerie, where one saw a woman range from deliquescence to giddiness to machination to panicked improvisation in a matter of minutes. It happened again with Brando in Streetcar—a human being caught in all the gaudy abundance of his being. “Marlon never did anything physical twice,” Tenn told me. “He let his body sweat and move as nature chose on that stage, and he hitched or removed his shirt accordingly. He scratched where it itched, in that time, in that moment. He wiped real sweat off of his brow in real time, regardless of where he was in the script. He dragged life and thought onto that stage.”

  No one, however, in Tenn’s estimation, brought the process of thought and intention to the stage as Geraldine Page did.

  “I wrote a play called Summer and Smoke,” Tenn told me. “I endured a production of that play in 1948, knew every word, comma, semicolon, exclamation point. And yet what I saw on the stage was alien to me, strange, unfelt. I did not recognize that play in the flat badness with which it was presented. When it was done again, almost four years later, I still knew every word, comma, semicolon, exclamation point, and I fought to have each and every one of them properly emphasized and retained. I fought to have some semblance of my vision retained in that tiny space downtown. I fought with José to assure the truth of the play. I was there, is what I’m trying to say, and yet all the times I watched that play, from a seat, from the back of the theater, from behind a pillar, in the company of an usher, it came to me new over and over. What I think Geraldine did was to subsume my own fears and fantasies of life and sex and self-destruction and shove them into her own skin and mannerisms, and then she played with them—which is to say, she responded in ways that were appropriate for the reactions or incentives she was given onstage each night. There was nothing frozen or rigid about her work: she understood that Alma, that all people, may operate from the same fears and patterns each day, but each day calls for a new means of pursuit, of preying, of getting what you need.”

  There was the memory of Page endowing the actor playing John with so astounding an ability of arousal that the audience became uncomfortably complicit in her unsound pursuit of him. “Tenn wanted to know how she did that,” Quintero told me. “He wanted to know if she looked at the actor and imagined cocks sticking out of every pore on his body, and Geraldine was horrified at that thought: She understood that there was power in sex, that we needed sex, but she also knew that it’s not enough to just want a man; it’s not enough to want some physical action. The need extends beyond the act of sex. It’s the fulfillment of a great and longstanding lack, so Geraldine looked at John and imagined that he had the heart or the kidney or the lung she would need to live throughout the week. The words and the actions of the play indicated that the need was sexual and emotional, but there was not, to Geraldine’s thinking, any great way of portraying that, so she took it higher. Alma’s full, total survival depended on John and what he could give her. Alma’s pact at the conclusion of the play—and, later, in the film—was a sad and puny one: she would submit to the mere physicality of a union with a man, and maybe he was simply cock and form and function, and it was chilling to see Alma on that level. You recognized her demotion from crazed romantic to avaricious victim.”

  Tenn had once described to Visconti, late into a Roman night, the effect of watching a young and pliant and joyously sexual James Dean dancing and swaying, clad in a robe and bearing scissors, taunting an unyielding yet clearly amused and intrigued Geraldine Page, her back hard but her eyes eagerly taking in the boy’s body. The play was The Immoralist, based on the novel by André Gide; and to the play’s director, Daniel Mann, Page described, from her reading of Gide’s work, a religion of male beauty to which she nightly converted and submitted. When she looked at James Dean on that stage, he was her God, his body her Eucharist, and her soul empty and ready to be filled with his gifts. Offstage she found Dean to be gifted but silly, undisciplined, and spoiled.

  Visconti asked Tenn to demonstrate the dance performed by Dean, as well as the reactions of Page, and he later incorporated elements of this re-creation into his film The Damned, in which Helmut Berger bandies his male beauty about like a new toy, which some find captivating and playful and others as dangerous as the impending Nazism that presses down on the film’s characters.

  Tenn had me write on three index cards the names Luchino Visconti and Lee Strasberg and Kim Stanley. I wedged them into the mirror of his bureau, and was told that they would crop up later, “if needed.”

  “Geraldine Page suffered no one outside the confines of her own home,” Tenn believed. “Her nature was soft and passive in social and professional situations. She was not one to make scenes; she tended to drift away, to move onto other subjects and other people. She shifted focus, and anyone who bored or angered or threatened her was suddenly relegated to an area where no harm could come to her.” Maureen Stapleton referred to Page as the “gauzy ghost,” a woman whose soul seemingly left her body when she no longer felt the need to be present. When I mentioned this to Page in our meeting, she laughed, and that hand went over her mouth, her characteristic gesture when she felt she had been found out. “I wish I could be bolder with people,” she confessed, “but I’m not the type of person who can announce that I’m unhappy or furious or tapped out. I always think it’s better to get away. I never felt I had to announce my absence. I think my absences spoke for themselves.”

  Fourteen

  “THIS NARRATIVE,” Tenn wrote in those pages he left behind in the hotel room, “what I call my fog, which I need to see rolling across my boards again, comes only to those who dream it into existence, who need it, who honor it. Any narrative that has found a home in my mental theater has been a literary orphan, and I gave it a home. One needs to be a suitable recipient of the narrative, the fog. I am no longer suitable to receive. Am I, to quote Paul Tillich, too proud to receive? Or have I debased the dreaming part of myself? Find the places where I once dreamed. Take young eyes and fear nothing.”

  Tenn had written next to this passage the name Joan Didion, and farther down he wrote that

  streets and counties and trees and winding roads deep in the pines of Mississippi belong forever to Faulkner; any map of Hawaii has among its arteries the memories and the experiences of James Jones; the street on which I stood high in the Hollywood Hills holds my memory of standing there and feeling young and on the verge of not only a city of dreams and possibilities and beauty, but a play about loving home and leaving home, and that city belongs to Joan Didion now. They have dreamed the strongest about those places, and those places belong to them, respond to them, produce for them.

  My places were emotional, primarily. I wrote of locales in which I had lived, or in which I imagined I could live, but the topography was primal and sexual and terminal. It bore no distinct architecture or design or dialect. It was merely human and in peril, which is to say universal. But on Royal and Coliseum and Vista—streets I cannot relinquish—I found my places and I dreamed a narrative. Can
I go there and find it again?

  Below this Tenn had written: “Pare down. Make it matter. Widen the margins. Increase the stakes.”

  I do not know if his note concerned what he had written or what he felt he needed to do personally, because throughout are notes about the reordering of his mind, his body, his living quarters. Particular notebooks were required. Pens with the finest points would allow him the maximum speed to get onto paper what he felt was imminent. “Pray for fog!” he wrote over and over, in excitement, next to paragraphs that pleased him. Alcohol consumption should be limited to the “white waters,” since they caused him less upset and lost time. Heavy meals no longer interested him; they “bogged him down” and kept him up late, gassy and anxious. “I adore the Mexican spirit,” he wrote, “and I am most comforted by soft Mexican skin, but the cuisine of that country leads me to the most ignominious conclusions.” It was vital that the odor of pine not be present in the apartment in New York or hotel rooms or any place he hung his “hungry hat”: it unnerved him, reminded him of hospitals and the house on Oriole where William Inge grew cold and sad and kept loitering in the garage, until he “finally maneuvered his smoothest drive, straight down a road that held his firmest intention.”

  There was a man, a drug dealer, who might be able to provide Tenn with various grades of cocaine, which to his mind should be, like tea or coffee, labeled as “Morning Blend,” “Evening Blend,” and “Blend Blend.”

  “I need a significant bump in the morning,” he wrote. “Nothing works or moves, and the first few lines force the blood into operation, the mind becomes nimble.” Later in the day, energy was called for, “nothing too manic or forced, and when sleep beckons I would like to be in a position to accept,” and when parties or dinners or social occasions were necessary, panes of time through which he passed fearing peril at every step, he wanted a “bold, white friend” to come along for the ride, “helping me laugh and move and hold in my pockets a few laughs, a crumb of inspiration.”

  I did not spend time with Tenn as a reporter: my eyes and ears were trained for the inspiration I hoped he would provide. I was not out for a story. I was not equipped emotionally or professionally for the gathering of facts outside my direct line of vision, what Tenn called my “charming purview.” And yet I knew that the frequent visits to bathrooms (he especially loved the ones in the Cabildo and in Tujague’s restaurant) involved pills and powders. The tabletops of the hotel room and the porcelain countertop in the bathroom appeared to have been utilized by a manic baker, and while I knew that Tenn was becoming impatient with our time together, and that he needed to get back to some serious work and be surrounded by people he had known for years, both Elia Kazan and Maria St. Just would tell me that his trip to New Orleans, like so many before it, to so many other cities, had been precipitated or terminated because of the balance of his chemical inventory. An actress with whom Tenn occasionally enjoyed the use of cocaine, and the waves of fervent nostalgia and brainstorming it engendered, told me that once he got back to New York from our time together, he placed an order, through her, for an ounce of cocaine. “The good stuff,” he told her. “I have a lot of work to do, and it feels good, and I don’t.” Tenn had told her that during the days he spent with me in New Orleans, he had been using less cocaine than usual. “This sweet boy,” he told her, was so ignorant and open and fervent that his visits were as invigorating as two or three or four fat tracks of cocaine.

  On another page, in a recounting of a conversation he and I had had about writers we both admired, Tenn had written: “Had I ever been this naïve? Had I ever loved words and the patterns they made on a page or on a heart or on the mind as this boy does? Ignorance is often sexual and deadly and poisonously addictive. It is often treacherous and mean, and you share space with it at great risk. I have never known it to be so exhilarating, so capable of allowing me to see things as I did when young and open and utterly unaware of so many things.”

  I had wanted to be of some help to Tenn, but I hadn’t known how. I learned in those notes that it was by knowing nothing and asking, as he wrote, “always, over and over, ‘What do you mean?’ I don’t know what I mean! But I keep trying to tell him.” And in the margin, next to this entry, one word: “Lunacy!”

  Tenn had asked me, early in our encounters, if I had paid any particular attention to the physical characteristics of the women I hoped might inspire characters in my work. I hadn’t thought much about it, but Tenn clearly had, for all of his writing life, and in our time together. There were six pages bulging with descriptions of every part, angle, and style of actress, along with analyses of what certain eyes, lips, and teeth implied or portended.

  Of an actress who hailed from St. Louis and who had appeared in one of his plays in an off-Broadway production, Tenn wrote that she had

  an alarming, starkly unappealing lack of proportion of face and head, like something Goya might have imagined or Picasso in making a political or social point. One eye is overwhelmingly larger than the other and it was even glazed and a bit askew: the eye of a specimen in an autopsy report. Her teeth appear to be rotting and her gums are an unhealthy shade of red, far too large, and serving as host to a set of teeth that are little more than squatters in a head that covers a mind that alternates between rich-girl sweetness and avaricious ambition. I want to trust her, and I want to like her. She is fulsome in her praise of me and my work. She claims to have known both my mother and my sister, and I try to imagine a link between us that extends beyond the confines of the theater, but I cannot trust her. There remains the old myth, rooted in my childhood, that one should not trust those with one small, mean, dead eye, or the teeth of a mummy rooted, perilously, in the dark gums of some voodoo priestess.

  In the margins Tenn imagined a short story he might call “Mummy Teeth and a Tiny Eye,” and on the opposite side of the page, he wrote a few sentences, which began

  The boy smelled perfume, a heavy floral scent, before he smelled the woman who sat in a chair before him. She was young and softly pretty, tired but polite, and she nodded her head toward him, and extended a hand: she hoped he would sit in the chair opposite him, beside which was a table that held a Bible and a small, burning candle. It was a bug candle, citron and chemicals to keep the mosquitoes, big and black and mean, away from their pale skins. Her clothes were colorful and neatly pressed and clean, but a smell, musky and oppressive and unpleasant, arose from her, pushing against him as persistently as the heat and the desire he had to know what lay ahead for him.

  The sentences were scratched through and Tenn had added an editorial comment: “Too much like Truman,” a reference, I later learned, to Capote’s short piece “Dazzle,” which had been given prominent placement in Esquire. There were dozens of pages upon which Tenn began profile pieces that he believed might make for a similar collection. One was headed “The Heat of the Cinema,” and had some of the details Tenn had told me about the time he had spent in the balconies of opulent movie theaters, sleeping and drinking and watching movies over and over, meeting men with similar interests, and heading home

  with a sandwich and a bottle of milk, the genesis of a hangover, and an urge to type something, anything, that might have the manic energy and the clean narrative line of what I had just seen. Silver and black and flashing images and ideas coming so fast and sharp. Take the vocal thread provided by Gladys George and have her hover over an errant and queer son; admonish him; fog rolls in.

  Four lines down he appeared to start the piece anew and wrote:

  Film is, in and of itself, an explosive object. Film is a medium that is dangerous in so many ways—injected with silver, poisons, odd recipes to capture, enhance, and transmit illusion. So I am very much alive and present and pregnant—with fear and joy and anticipation when I watch a film. It is for me an act of not only capturing a past event—the event of performance and collaboration—but a living, very kinetic act: the film spools and crackles and shines.

  Every film is exciting to m
e, for the best and worst reasons. Films I’ve loved in the past are new to me because I keep discovering details that fascinate me. I am a writer who was very much shaped by movies, far more than literature and theater. Film came into my life and my consciousness long before I had ever heard of Chekhov or Ibsen or Shakespeare or Strindberg. Flaubert and Turgenev were brought to me at a time when I had seen certain films more than fifty times. I am a student, a lover, a product of films.

  On another page, Tenn wrote, “Jim should know more about this,” then continued:

  The one requisite attribute that I always notice among film stars is hunger. There is a ravenous quality to film stars that is deeply sexual, deeply disturbing. I don’t think that a person acquires this quality through training: I think it lodges within the system of a person through experience and expression, and I think it begins in childhood, with the development of multiple lacunas that must be filled. Hungers that must be sated. Every film star I ever met, particularly those of the female persuasion (this would include several film actors, obviously), has a core of obsessive connection, by which I mean a craving to connect with each and every person upon contact. This is not always done in an obvious manner, as a Joan Crawford or Bette Davis might be—and have been—with me: a cloying and yet abrasive manner that shifts them to the center of attention. Rita Hayworth was overtly sexual, playful, as was Doris Day, in an entirely different style.