Follies of God

by James Grissom

  Rapid style is what William Wyler told me all actresses had. They adapt with awesome rapidity and rapacity. Shall I be a slut? Shall my lips be moist? What is my motivation, indeed! An actress becomes whatever she must to be needed, and a film actress, in order to survive, must become whatever she must to be needed and salable and desired. This is some heavy shit. What is especially admirable is the manner in which they take their hungers, their needs, their collective angers and styles, and compress them all into an entity that can then be sold, like soda or lipstick or turtle wax, and give it to a roomful of strangers and … connect.

  Barbara Stanwyck has volumes of rage and regret within her tiny frame, and the years of repression bubble and spew up through her body and rest tightly and elegantly right behind her two front teeth. Her words barely fit through this slit that her mouth becomes—I mean a slit created by tension and emotion, not by actually compressing her lips, which are always available and approachable. She is coiled, right down to her vowels, by both rage and resignation. Within my memory of every Stanwyck performance is her slow cocking of the head, the raising of an eyebrow, the languid droop of her lids—resignation, acceptance, revenge. Big emotions, small gestures, an ultimate victory. A lifetime of grievances and lusts and allegiances contained in a flick of the head or hand, a sassy walk, a cinched waist. But always winning, striding forcefully toward victory. She doesn’t always get (or want) the guy or the company or the love of a child. She might even lose her mind or her life. Her victory is won from the audience—who admire, crave, and fear her. She has never not had us where she wanted us, and she has never been far from where she always wanted to be—at the hot, dead center of our attention. I only met her once. I saw her several times, at dismal affairs: premieres, parties, burnished hallways of film supplication. (Which is to say, an appointment with a producer.) She was introduced to me by, of all people, Gertrude Lawrence, who had just endured, shall we say, an embarrassment of poor intentions and rich irony at a screening of The Glass Menagerie. Stanwyck was gracious and laconic; very tiny, very chic, very controlled. But I met her! I doubt I made much of an impression, for I was not only speechless, but I was the author of a play that had just served as a suppository. But I saw the eyes, the lips. Contact was made.

  Another page held writing that was markedly neater than the others: it was a report, a presentation of sorts, for me. In the upper-right-hand corner was an address in the East Forties of New York, and in underlined capital letters Tenn had written: TURTLE BAY, HEPBURN, KATHARINE.

  This, you see, is true rapid style, willful and consistent and permanent. The life is the performance, the gestures strokes of color on canvas, every word an aria reaching the upper reserves, every opinion a new school of philosophy seeking adherents. Ego and energy and effort. All the time. A wily but limited intelligence. Facts for her are things to be bent and molded toward her needs and ignored if they fail to satisfy or flatter. Her mind, clear and primed at all times for conquest, has been compressed and cajoled, like the foot of a geisha, into a particular size and shape that will get her to the sound stage, the theater, the center of attention.

  Another page: “The Center of Attention: The Only Known Address for an Actress.”

  A list of hands, with Kim Hunter, Betsy Palmer, and Nan Martin earning honors for having the longest, boniest hands, rendering them unsuitable as sympathetic heroines. “Poor Betsy Palmer,” Tenn wrote. “I liked her and I felt she might have had some talent, which she squandered. She took on Alma, but her hands were too broad and long and hard. They were not the hands of a supplicant.”

  He harbored a fascination with the complexion of Glenda Jackson, an actress he found to be diabolically gifted and intelligent, and with whom he hoped to work, on a new piece, as he couldn’t fathom her placement in an existing play. But he was amazed to discover that she was “blotchy and shiny, her face liberally littered with the pimples of a teenager and pores as large and open as the eyes of startled kittens.” With her face clean of makeup, Tenn found Jackson to be shy, soft-spoken, reticent, but once she had assembled her “formidable maquillage and a shiny, defensive wig,” she became a lovely and confident and dismissive “grand lady, as confident behind her mask of liquids and powders and paints as we had been as children behind our masks of goblins and criminals and cretins, haunting the streets on Halloween night. New identities, new personalities.”

  Age was a judgment as well as a biological and inevitable fact. Skin sagged and faded in accordance with spiritual valor or its absence; eyes betrayed nothing, or would reveal one’s interests and intention. A downturned mouth might connote cruelty and disappointment, or it might be a calling card left after the visitation of tragedy, physical or psychic; therefore, Beatrice Straight’s “hard, thin, southward-bound” mouth was due to her realization that her vast family fortune guaranteed her nothing but curiosity and lengthy visitations from the needy, while Catherine Deneuve’s “frosty, firm bite” was due to her having witnessed the violent death of her sister, actress Françoise Dorléac. (That this did not, in fact, actually happen did not deter Tenn. “The event has been developed on her face as if it were a photograph,” he insisted.)

  I needed to look closely at eyes and lips, both on a personal basis and before I began to write a character possessing the same features. “Keep a journal of those elements that please, annoy, or alarm you,” he told me. “As a writer, whatever you believe about a person is true.” In real life, however, where interaction with skin and sinew is necessary, what is true is highly subjective, and it needs to be sought out. The reality of all people, Tenn believed, could be discerned through eyes, hands, and voice. “I find that the soul of a person, their honest and expressed beliefs and desires, are shown through these attributes,” he wrote, and he gave me examples of the types of voices that not only pleased him aesthetically but also helped him to create characters, to write, to live. Tenn was partial to voices that from experience and “sensual awareness” sounded as if some form of mastication were taking place with the words spoken. Edith Evans sounded to him always as if she were gargling a jar of sour balls; and Helen Mirren, an actress known at that time primarily for her blond good looks, was someone he trusted to do well, if only because when she spoke, her words flowed like the ejaculate that would appear if she had managed to fellate a vat of marmalade. “I see that this is both a physical and a sexual impossibility,” Tenn told me, “but I believe that my auditory point is made.”

  Tenn bemoaned the fact that voices of stage actors and actresses were no longer given the place of importance that once existed: a lovely voice was at one time an inducement to seek employment as an actress, and Guthrie McClintic had once told Tenn that the voice of an actress was an indicator of talent to come, talent perhaps hidden, talent waiting to be coaxed from within. McClintic’s wife, Katharine Cornell, had one of the voices that pleased Tenn greatly—deep and rich and slightly mournful. Cornell seduced vowels, and her sentences, especially in her performance in Antony and Cleopatra, tended to end with a nearly imperceptible gasp, as if the completion of that particular act of spoken art had been slightly beyond her abilities. “It was riveting,” Tenn remembered, “and although I know it was the trick of a skilled actress, it was done well, and I bought it. I learned to hear and to understand that play—that type of play—by virtue of how she parsed and shared her sentences.”

  Jessica Tandy and Julie Harris, two actresses Tenn admired, had, in fact, poor voices: thin and high-pitched, prone to scratching the ear if intense emotions were called for. Both learned to compensate through the use of facial expressions and the manipulation of their bodies to convey feelings and effects their voices could not evoke. In a long section Tenn wrote about the Actors Studio, he revealed that his chief criticism was the school’s disdain and disregard for the development of its students’ voices and bodies. “Their ids and their egos and their maladjustments were heavily scrutinized and valued,” he wrote, “but their voices were no better, no stronger, n
o more capable of expressing the multitude of themes contained in the great works than when they first harbored a dream of acting. They sound, always and forever, like the eager and intense students of an urban high school.”

  Talent and beauty both bore expiration dates and short shelf lives unless a concerted series of efforts were maintained to keep the heart and the mind growing and learning and loving, unless a “heartfelt intention” was supported. Tenn was amazed by those women who seemed to have landed upon a fast track to “early deaths of potential and possibilities,” but he told me to be wary of them, for they had earned their rapid decomposition.

  I found an assignment within the pages: Tenn wanted me to write a short story in which a person begins as attractive or ugly and steadily reverses course, without any descriptions of physical change. “Do it all through characterization,” he wrote. “Do it all with words.” All of us change, he kept reminding me, even if only through our own perceptions. Remain alert: “Wariness,” he told me, “is a gift.”

  I discovered that Tenn had come to these pages after our days together and had continued his study of the subjects we’d covered, so I could read that Geraldine Page and Estelle Parsons were “long-term” artists, solid in ways that so many others were not, even as they had “clear indications of neuroses and those concomitant illnesses of the theater.” Page and Parsons were good women to study in contrast to Kim Stanley, whose talents were short-term, aging from birth, and wasting more rapidly than fish in the glare of a summer sun. Katharine Hepburn was a “willful and resourceful star,” striving always to become an actress, with limited results, but her stamina was such that Tenn sent me to see her. “A gilded and willful retardation is a valuable asset,” he assured me. “It is never easy to believe in oneself. Bend the facts; change the narrative. You must always remind yourself that you must win. Katharine Hepburn, while living and moving, appears always to have won. Find out how she has done this.”

  “Investigate any and all myths,” Tenn wrote, circling the admonition. All of those people in pursuit of the arts or show business or attention (or all three) will have had their time in the duck press of egos, which is to say they have seen reality and it holds no place for them. This is a truth almost impossible to bear for most people, but a particularly difficult one for actresses, who, unlike writers, have no pale judgment to sit before and scribble upon: their scratches are made on their own psyches and the doors of agents and producers. The isolation of the actress leads her to investigate other realms from which she might find comfort or counsel to help her weather the realm into which she has been born and in which she seeks employment. Any number of gods, goddesses, gurus, shamans, therapists, nutritionists, card readers, and trainers will be called on to give her faith and courage. The metaphysical as well as the theatrical résumés of these women would most likely be padded, Tenn warned, and I should look into their systems of support. “You might learn something you can use,” he assured me, “and you will definitely understand them better, and you will learn if any of it has helped them to matter.”

  Places are made, created, protected. No one writes a play or has it produced without struggles that deserve a story, and no actress builds a body of work without some sacrifice and subterfuge that reveal as much about her, if not more, than any performance given. There were no accidents that Tenn could conceive. People moved to the locations that would best serve their desired narrative. They altered their appearances, their résumés, their diets, their peccadilloes. They married well or they did not marry at all. They said what needed to be said when it served a purpose, unless they were Geraldine Page, Estelle Parsons, or Zoe Caldwell, three women who brandished brutal gifts of honesty like “ploughshares or the cocks of captors.” On three separate occasions in these pages, Tenn urged me to be like Page and Parsons and eliminate and ignore the people and the works that were not serious, worthy, deserving of one’s time. As I studied these women, on whom he desired reports, delivered by phone or by mail, I should believe nothing, stay longer than I might want to, look for the facts that had been altered, the man behind the curtain who was pulling the strings. “The man behind the curtain is the id,” Tenn wrote, “and he only appears when someone is tired. Wear them out.”

  Above all else, be tough. Actresses, Tenn assured me, were both deserving of and inured to abuse, in the form of broken promises, phone calls unreturned, representation precipitately canceled when returns dwindled or personalities chafed, when the soul pulled the face and body into the forms they now deserved. “If they give you trouble,” he told me, “call me and I’ll see what I can do. Otherwise, be dismissive and abrupt, and they’ll do whatever you want them to. They will notice the shift of focus, and they will assume they deserve it, and they will endow you with some sort of power forever denied them, and you will get what you need.”

  The bottom line: find a voice and use it to give to others. On a neatly folded piece of onionskin paper, Tenn wrote directly to me:

  What I want you to know is that I needed to be heard through my art; later to avenge through it. And then I was dependent upon it, because it was all that kept me alive. Now I see that the anger I felt for so long about the gawky queer that I was seems entirely misguided. I was indeed a gawky queer, but I was a cosseted, husbanded, much-loved gawky queer, and my anger soon dissipated, and I was ready to fill my work with the gratitude and the love that has been shown to me by these remarkable women—those who inspired my plays and those who inhabited them. And now, ironically, I have no voice. I have a voice to share with you the names of these women and the generosity I hold for them, but I lack the voice to praise them or to write for them or to say what frightens me the most. I am desperate to give, to share, to love. But I destroyed my voice. I wasted energies on emotions unfounded and unfocused. I want my voice, Jim. I need my voice. Don’t lose yours. Speak truthfully and fearlessly, and for God’s sake, give. Give everything you have. I miss nothing more than giving. All other diminishments and declivities I can suffer. But I remain a gift unwanted in every quarter, and I most want to give.

  The final entry within was titled “Strangers on a Train,” but it had nothing to do with the Alfred Hitchcock film. Instead, Tenn wrote:

  I have always felt as if I traveled through life on one train, while, on an alternate track an alternate train, of my own creation, moved along with me. This alternate train followed me through my life—and still does—but it is populated with those people I might wish to know or to be, and it stops at those destinations I might have preferred over the itinerary fate and folly have dealt me. So many of the women I have known and admired—and feared and ridiculed—have had similar travel arrangements. I used to think, as I held on to my strap, on the train I did not choose, that if I hoped enough, dreamed enough, I might make the move to that other train. In living my life in this foolish way, I came to realize that every encounter in my life, and therefore in my plays, had at its core a feverish desire, a longing, perhaps a futile one, almost always a futile one, as I think on it. But I came to see that this desire is nothing more than prayer. True prayer. When I fell to the depths and sought help from the religious, they sought to teach me the art of prayer, and I dutifully followed along, eager to learn and to be saved. Then I saw that what they most envied, most desired, was that energetic and stupidly hopeful desire I had manifested, eyes closed, on that damn train of mine.

  In the margin: “You are on this train with me now. I know that I contradict myself and may appear angry, but I do my work with love, and I ask that you do the same. God help you.”

  Fifteen

  IN THE TIME that I knew her, Jo Van Fleet arose every morning and had a cup of coffee and a glass of wine, the latter consumed before a large, framed poem written in her honor by Ben Belitt. As she told me often, she could read this poem and feel better about herself because she had “once been noticed and appreciated.” The wine might have made her feel a little lighter about the loads she insisted others had given her to carry,
but the poem helped her in her daily insistence that she had been great, had possessed a talent that startled actors, audiences, playwrights, and at least one poet, who had come to be friends with her when he was a faculty member at Bennington along with William Bales, Jo’s husband. “People used to notice me,” Jo would say, and she would set her mouth in a sneer that is visible in all of her screen performances, most noticeably as James Dean’s mother in East of Eden, for which she received an Oscar in 1956. “Poor Jo,” Tenn had said. “She makes that sneer and it’s as if she’s smelling the rotting of her soul.”

  The Belitt poem made her feel appreciated, but so did the words Tenn had said about her, and when I typed them up and gave them to her, she began to carry them with her in a canvas tote bag that she took with her on her walks about the city. On occasion, she would also place her Oscar, now tarnished and a bit mottled, in this bag, and off she would go, to regale shopkeepers, her dining companions in local cafeterias, and the booksellers outside Zabar’s with this treasure, and everyone would marvel at the opportunity to hold this recognized prize. (Once, when a man who sat near us in a diner was holding the Oscar and improvising an acceptance speech, Jo muttered, almost inaudibly, “I wish it gave me as much pleasure as it does him.”) Then she would hurriedly stuff it back in her tote bag and be on her way.