Follies of God

by James Grissom

  Her daily trip was almost always the same. She would leave her apartment, at Riverside Drive and Seventy-eighth Street and slowly—oh, God, how slowly!—walk down to Ninth Avenue and Fifty-first Street, to St. Clare’s Hospital. Her husband, once a dancer and a longtime instructor at many colleges, was now confined to a hospital bed, a victim of Alzheimer’s, and on several occasions Jo asked me to accompany her. Jo would say the same things to the same people every time (“Hi, I’m Jo Van Fleet, and I’m here to see my husband,” “I used to be a great actress, you know”) and she would introduce me, telling them I was very important and I was going to reintroduce her to a theatrical world that had forgotten what real acting was like.

  We would then go up to William Bales’s room, where he lay, stunned and silent, although he would often clearly recognize Jo and would try to speak. Most times, however, Jo simply kissed him on the forehead, put her tote bag on the floor, and sat in a chair by his bedside. She would begin by telling him all that she had done, but mostly she would complain that no one was helping her. (“I called Colleen again. She’s head of Actors Equity, but she won’t help me. She’s such a liar. Anne and Eli brought me some food, but I didn’t like it. They don’t care about my needs.”) Eventually, she would tire of this litany, and she would stand and pace the room for a minute or two, then turn toward the bed and transform herself. Although she was then in her mid-seventies, was in poor health, and drank heavily throughout the day, Jo would proceed to recite Shakespeare sonnets, a monologue from Camino Real (a role she created on Broadway, and which she delivered perfectly), lines from her films East of Eden and Wild River, as well as nursery rhymes and songs that Jo and Bill had sung to their son, Michael.

  In these performances, of which I witnessed only three, Jo became an actress again, and she clearly relished the opportunity to perform. “You see,” Tenn had told me, “an actress will create an opportunity to act at every occasion. The ordering of a meal in a restaurant will have all the texture or range or drama of an O’Neill play or a Wagnerian opera. They give it their all, because they live in a business—a culture—that rarely requires even a minimum of what they believe they can give.”

  So in that little hospital room, Jo acted again, and if her husband attempted to speak, or if he appeared to cry, she felt that she had done well, had provided a service to an appreciative audience. When I would compliment her on her recitation of a particular sonnet, she would stand tall, thank me, but add in her astringent voice (“all bile and citrus and pride,” Tenn had called it), “That’s sweet, but you’re young and stupid and have no idea of what I can do.”

  Jo would pick up her tote bag and begin the long walk home. Sometimes we exchanged words; more often than not we walked in silence. On one of our walks home after a hospital visit, we were standing at an intersection when Jo looked over at a newsstand and read that Tony Perkins had AIDS. Jo had loved Tony, had worked with him onstage in Look Homeward, Angel and on film in This Angry Age, and I heard her yelp with pain before I saw the headline. Jo dropped her bag and began crying, walking in circles, confused. Passersby looked on at this tiny woman and laughed, thinking they were merely witnessing a crazy New Yorker having a spell. When Jo noticed their laughter, she turned on them and yelled, “I’m crying for you, don’t you see? Because you don’t get that it’s all shit! Life is nothing but shit!”

  AMID THEIR LAUGHTER, Jo picked up her bag and we began walking again. Mildred Natwick lived in a sunny penthouse apartment on Park Avenue, lemony and spotless and elegant. Tenn had never worked with Miss Natwick, but he adored her, sought her out at openings and auditions, visited her backstage, and claimed that Guthrie McClintic had told him that a season with Millie was worth more than a decade with doctors. “Guthrie was convinced that Millie had healing powers,” Tenn told me, “but when I questioned her about them, she assured me that the powers belonged to Mary Baker Eddy, and she was merely a conduit. I went home and looked up ‘conduit,’ but it didn’t seem to apply to the actress I knew.”

  Each morning Millie read her Bible Lesson from the Christian Science Quarterly, which comprised selections from the King James Bible and others from Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Millie did not like to discuss her religion, and indeed I knew her for many months before she would talk openly about it with me. “I mean,” she would say, in that sweet, quizzical voice of hers, “they don’t ask Helen Hayes about the Roman Catholic faith, and they shouldn’t, but when anyone learns of my beliefs, they think I’m an expert. I’m merely a student. Edith Evans”—also a Christian Scientist—“used to say, ‘Millie, just go on being perfect and they won’t ask any more questions. They’ll just follow you around and get the point.’ But I hardly think myself perfect.”

  After her lesson, which she surmised took her anywhere from forty-five minutes to an hour, Millie would ready herself for her day. As she did so, she would recite the Scientific Statement of Being: “There is no life, truth, intelligence, or substance in matter …” But her favorite passage, and the one to which she would cling whenever she was faced with pain or illness or doubt or depression, was: “All is infinite Mind, and its infinite manifestation, Man.”

  Once, when I was having a difficult time, Millie was instantly helpful, in ways both practical and supernal. Millie had an easy and cheerful generosity, which blended effortlessly with her dignified reserve, and the recipient never felt discomfort or judgment. Because she always noted her gratitude for anything you had done for her, her aid to you was simply, in her words, “fair and deserved,” and she would always add, “Let’s make nothing of this as quickly as possible.” Her devotion to Christian Science had freed her from the tyranny of illness and pain, she admitted, but it continued to help her address the question of who she was and what she was intended to become. Although Millie was in her late seventies when I began to spend time with her, she was actively involved in “the act of becoming,” and she was endlessly interested in reaching her goal of being “utterly in the Mind and out of the body.”

  When Tenn and I were walking in the French Quarter, we stopped in a small antiques shop that had once been, he swore, a gay bar for young men who appreciated older men. “So it is in the lease that it must remain in the trade of antiquities,” he quipped, then walked to the rear of the store to use the bathroom. The proprietor said nothing, only warmly shaking Tenn’s hand as he began to leave the store. As we were walking out, Tenn noticed a small, decoupaged square on which was a prayer written by Mary Baker Eddy. Tenn purchased it, which surprised both me and the proprietor, but he gave it to me to give to Millie when I met her. “I think,” Tenn said, “that the words of this woman have helped Millie to realize herself.”

  When I gave the gift to Millie, eight years after Tenn had purchased it, Millie was moved and embarrassed, and only said, “I would like to think that I became something, but I’m not yet all that I could have been or should have been.” She looked at me and smiled, clearly closing the subject, but I knew somehow that she would return to it.

  “Millie is loved and wonderful,” Tenn told me, “but she has within her, I think, a rage as to what might have been. I believe that she, like all of us, has a deep hurt, a gash, a wound, that she chooses to cure or remove with a positive agenda, where others exploit this wound, or reveal this wound, to achieve uniqueness or attention or surcease. I would like to know how she takes care of herself, and what she feels led her to this obsessive need to purify and reshape herself. How muddy can her waters be?”

  Millie was always active. She saw plays and operas and exhibitions. She visited friends with cheer and aid. She attended and hosted parties. She took a huge interest in whatever presented itself to her, but I could see that as she did these things, she was fully engaged in her inner reconstruction. When I told her about Tenn’s analogy about our lives being two trains running simultaneously, she laughed like a delighted little girl, and agreed immediately. “That is so true,” she said, “and I’m the dotty old wom
an who always misses her stop. But I’m okay, because I would rather keep traveling.”

  Mildred Natwick was born in Baltimore, early in the twentieth century (she was cagey with the date) into what she called relative comfort; and while attending college, she finally admitted to her parents that she wanted to be an actress. “I was beautifully raised by my parents,” Millie told me, “and I never felt a lack of anything, but it was not until the day they gave me their blessing to be an actress that I felt accepted, loved, assured.” Early in her career, Millie became a favorite of Joshua Logan, who cast her in several plays in repertory, which led her to her Broadway debut in 1932. While that was a propitious date in her life, far more important was her meeting Guthrie McClintic and Katharine Cornell. “If Christian Science gave me the foundation for life and living,” Millie told me late in our relationship, “then I can tell you that Guthrie and Katharine gave me the foundation for a life in the theater.” While Millie would never have said disparaging things about herself and others, she alluded to the fact that she had lacked confidence in her appearance, but that these doubts had been cleared away by Cornell. “Katharine Cornell was a great beauty,” Millie told me, “and her beauty came not from jars or camouflage, but from within. Mary Baker Eddy tells us that to have more beauty we must have less illusion and more soul, and this was manifested in her. She looked at me one day and she said …” Millie paused, laughed, blushed, and then continued. “She said, ‘Millie, your face is a comfort to me and to others. Its beauty is the beauty you find in things that loved ones have given you. And I like to see you coming.’ So I knew—how could I not?—that I would never be as appealing as Katharine Cornell, but I trusted her so much as a friend and an actress that I felt if she didn’t mind seeing me coming, I wasn’t insane to think I could walk on a stage.”

  Mildred Natwick was almost Quaker-like in appearance and demeanor—calm, kind, virtually invisible—but her acting reminded Tennessee of finely spun crystal, and he frequently sought out her clear mind and persistent cheer. (illustration credit 15.1)

  Millie appeared in several productions with Cornell, but her greatest triumphs were in plays not affiliated with her mentor. “And I rather liked that,” Millie admitted, “because it meant that I could be surprised by a visit from Katharine when I least expected it, offering the perfect words, as only she could supply them.” Millie created the role of Madame Arcati in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit in New York, and became one of Truman Capote’s favorite actresses when she appeared in his Grass Harp, an experience he remembered so fondly that he insisted that she appear in the filmization of his short story “Miriam” when it was incorporated into Frank Perry’s Trilogy in 1969.

  “What Millie has in her work,” Tenn told me, “is what every writer craves, which is loving detail. Millie’s work is utterly seamless, and yet it never appears overcontrolled or artificial. You never see the work; only the result.”

  “It’s funny you should bring that up,” Millie told me, “because when I was working with Ralph Richardson in The Waltz of the Toreadors, I had a difficult part, but I loved it. I once told Ralph that the work was torture, but divine.” When I asked what made the part difficult for her, she winced again, and admitted that she hated to talk about acting. “I just think it’s so impossible. I get sent these books where actors are interviewed and go on and on about approaching a role or analyzing an emotion, and I feel they might as well let me watch them have their teeth cleaned. You pour yourself, all that you are and all that you can spare, into the role that has been written, and you use your script as your guide. Your director is your guide to the script, and if you’re lucky, both you and the director are headed in the right direction. That is that. Everything else merely happens.” She then related how, after one especially good performance, Richardson had asked her how she had accomplished a particular dance step that had as its denouement a line reading that always tickled him. “And I said, ‘Oh, Ralph, I don’t know,’ and he tried to have me reproduce it, and it utterly failed. Outside of the context of that play, without our other actors, and without the parameters that Harold Clurman had set for us, nothing made sense, nothing worked. Ralph, heartbroken, looked at me and said, ‘Never mind.’ Well, I felt awful, like a truly bad actress. Then, the next night, the scene went beautifully, perfect, heavenly. Backstage, Ralph said, ‘Millie, you got it right out there. Why not for me?’ And I said, ‘Ralph, it happened when it was supposed to.’ And that’s all I want to say about acting.”

  For many, Millie is known for her reprise of her Broadway role in the film version of Barefoot in the Park, for which she won an Oscar nomination, and for her role opposite Helen Hayes in the television series The Snoop Sisters, for which she won an Emmy, and she is still spoken of with admiration for her work. But no one seemed to capture her special appeal better than Tenn, when he said: “Detail upon detail upon detail. An accretion of apt movements and sounds that add up to an utterly real moment in time. You don’t see huge explosions of theatricality in her work, just tiny flashes of humanity.”

  Millie’s eyes welled up when I read her those words. “I never even knew that Tennessee knew my name! And to say something like that! That is enough for me.”

  NOTHING WAS EVER enough for Jo Van Fleet. According to Barbara Baxley, who had known her since she—Baxley—was a young girl, this may have been because Jo was recognized as a good actress at an early age, and she continued in her quest despite great resistance from her parents, who felt a theatrical career was beneath a proper and intelligent woman. “So anger and rage and a sense of ‘Look at me now, folks’ energized everything she did,” Baxley told me, and it may help to explain her ease in parts requiring both great strength and cynicism. “When she was most sour,” Baxley quipped, “she was most Jo.”

  And yet Jo had her supporters. Herbert Berghof thought her both a marvelous actress and a potential teacher. Berghof’s wife, Uta Hagen, told me that “Jo was good, but Jo was always unstable, so Herbert gave her responsibilities he felt she could handle, which is to say they were limited. Jo used to call me and beg to teach with us here [at HB Studio in Greenwich Village], and right when I would feel sorry for her and might imagine that I could have her do something, she would say, ‘It’s time they were taught by a real actress,’ and I would calmly hang up the phone.”

  Jo was cast in Camino Real, in 1953, as Marguerite Gautier, and her scene was not working particularly well. “Gadg [Kazan] alienated his affections from that play very early on,” Tenn told me, “and he adopted a very lax attitude toward the whole enterprise. I had troubles with Jo’s scene, and I literally and figuratively threw up my hands. I was not in a healthy frame of mind then, and Jo saw this and volunteered to work on her own scene herself. Well, by God, she went away and typed up some pages, making her the lead of course, but from those pages I was able to construct her part anew, and it was much stronger. I could see she was happy to have control over a part, and a production, and she was very easy to work with.”

  “Jo is tragic,” Kazan told me, “and to mention her name in some settings is to see an entire group of people shudder. She seemed—and seems—hell-bent on destroying herself, and I do not know why. To direct her was often a grueling challenge, for while she wanted desperately to be true to the part, she intrinsically believes that she is smarter than everyone else on the set, including the director and the playwright. Many times she pushed me away, muttering, ‘I know, dammit! I know what to do!’ I put up with it, but more often than not, others decided that once was enough.”

  Jo earned a Tony Award in 1954 for her work in Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful, then an Oscar for her work with Kazan in East of Eden. “My persistent direction of Jo,” Kazan told me, “was ‘Tight, tight. Keep it tight, Jo,’ and I think she had migraines for a month keeping herself so rigid and constricted, but she was brilliant. Run her scenes and it’s always amazing.” Jo was equally strong in Kazan’s Wild River, but after her cameo as Paul Newman’s dying mother
in Cool Hand Luke, she worked only a handful of times. Her last leading role onstage was in 1962, in Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Momma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad, and Jerome Robbins, the director of that play, told me that he thought Jo was capable of becoming a major actress. “I thought she was larger than life, eccentric, a great leading character actress,” he told me, “and I thought that maybe America would finally have its own Edith Evans, or a grainier, meaner Ruth Gordon. But for every good moment Jo had, she had to produce three equally horrendous ones that would shatter a performance or alienate the entire company.” When I told Jo that Robbins thought her potentially a great actress, she yelled out, “Fuck him! He never called me, never sent me a dime, never even sent me a goddamn chicken potpie from Zabar’s! Him with all his money! So I reject that completely. If he really meant that, he would feed me.”

  “Epically devious” with both her talent and her attentions, Jo Van Fleet was an actress Tennessee loved to watch, write for, talk to about plays; but her company was, as he put it, “hellish, black with rage.” (illustration credit 15.2)

  Time—its passage, its effects, its value—fascinated and frightened Tenn. There was the time that was helpful and healing, as when one takes stock of a situation, thinks things out, perhaps takes a nap. Far more often there was the ravaging time, which took away opportunity and health. Time was money, time was health, time was everything. Again, that analogy to trains, swiftly moving, keeping to their own ceaseless, uncaring schedules: “And heading to a station near you!” he would cackle. “All of my women—in my plays, of course, but I think in my life as well—are frantic, preternaturally aware of this train heading toward them called time, and utterly unaware of who’s going to be getting on or getting off. Youth: heading out of town! Illness: incoming! Work: out of town! New opportunities: service interrupted!”