Follies of God

by James Grissom

  Tenn would giggle uproariously at these proclamations, seemingly unaware that others might be discomfited by them. Then again, he thought Blanche DuBois was the funniest female character in modern American theater, and that Billie Dawn, the character immortalized by Judy Holliday in Garson Kanin’s Born Yesterday wasn’t nearly so entertaining. “I mean, when they take her away at the end, I think it’s hysterical that she pops right back into her games. She hasn’t lost a thing, except her hold on reality. And what,” he always asked when the subject arose, “has reality ever done for anybody?”

  To be constantly aware of time and its effects made Tenn—and Tenn’s women—jittery, agile at dodging reality and responsibilities, adept at adopting new strategies of living. The most effective foundation that he felt could be placed underneath this shaky edifice we call life was desire, which he felt was nothing more than prayer.

  “I was sent to a monastery once,” Tenn said, and he enjoyed my shock of his being in such a setting. “Now calm down,” he said, chuckling. “I was sent there after one of my many travails, mental and physical, and it was believed that it might help me. This was during my rush toward Catholicism, which I felt was my only alternative to death or madness. It was during this sojourn, as they insisted upon calling it, that I realized how much fear we all carry, how fear is the fuel in all of our engines. And when fear motivates us, we tend to fall into a repetitious recitation of requests. When a friend of mine was mugged in New York in the seventies (and who wasn’t?), she just said, over and over, ‘No, please, no, please, no, please no,’ which was merely her prayer to survive that situation. When I was in the hospital, waiting to see if I indeed would die, I actually wanted my mother and Frank, one of whom was useless and the other dead. My desire wasn’t actually to have them with me, but to again feel whatever comfort I might have known with them. But mainly—youth and health! Bring them back!”

  The women of Tenn’s plays spoke in a pattern that he felt mirrored his own habits when he was afraid. “Not so much when I’m drunk, you see,” he admitted, “because, of course, I am then not myself, but a medicated person who responds in a wholly different manner than a real person, an honest person. But when I am fully aware, I babble and charm and cajole, and so do my characters.”

  Tenn noted Blanche’s endless nattering about literature, life, clothing—anything—to ward off not only inspection by those who might be observing her, but also time’s endless choreography into our space. “Oh, God,” Tenn would laugh, “I used to believe that if I just created enough, just laughed enough, I could hold back the demons of time, and the effects they visit upon us. What was that great quote by Thornton Wilder?” (He was thinking of “He who is happy is forever out of time’s grasp.”) “Oh, let me tell you, I looked for happiness, and happy times are as consuming as the bad times; they just use you up to a different tempo.”

  Maggie of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was, in Tenn’s mind, a supplicant crouched, mentally and at times physically, in a perpetual and penitential prayer. “The need for love, physical and emotional, was so strong in Maggie, and in me, that it consumes her life and her mind, and everything she does or says, is clouded, as with a cheap perfume, with this desire, this prayer, for Brick’s love, for Big Daddy’s support, for Big Mama’s understanding and aid, and for Sister Woman’s respect. This longing, this infernal, annoying longing, which we all must disguise as—charm? beauty? wit? talent? I chose to make Maggie alluring and fertile, frantically fertile, and those are the only amulets she has in her long prayer. But in her speech, I made her plead for her moments with those characters, for her redemption, so to speak, and it is my prayer that speaks through Maggie.

  “I turned to Catholicism because, at an advanced artery of illness in my life, I felt I had run out of options, had used up my privileges at the other troughs of redemption,” Tenn told me. “However, I remain, at heart, and in style, an Episcopalian, those words, desires, and rhythms pounded upon and within me by the merciless taskmaster who was my grandfather. And when I find that I’m in arrears, it is those prayers that I turn to, those words, those rhythms. In fact, the words are meaningless; it is the rhythms, the intent, that comfort me, and when I wandered into churches on foreign soil, the prayers, uttered in tongues unknown to me, nonetheless offered comfort.”

  At that moment, despite a day of alcohol and numerous infusions of pills, Tenn began to quote those prayers that gave him most comfort, particularly this one: “O Gracious Father, who opennest Thine hand and fillest all things living with plenteousness; We beseech Thee of thine infinite goodness to hear us, who now make our prayers and supplications unto thee …”

  “I immediately reach for those prayers when I find myself bound by the results of my poor intentions,” Tenn told me. “I wish I had reached for those prayers more frequently than I reached for pills or liquor or flesh, but that story has been written.”

  “That train has left the station?” I asked.

  “Very good,” Tenn chuckled, “and precisely the point you should have reached.”

  JO VAN FLEET CLAIMED never to pray, at least not to God. However, she admitted that when she was most despondent, she often felt she could do nothing but call out in anger or fear, often finding comfort in the exhaustion that resulted from the consistent badgering of … “Of what?” I asked her. “Forces beyond our control,” Jo replied. “Fate, I imagine.”

  Jo never admitted to using alcohol, even as I would sit and watch her consume one of the huge bottles of inexpensive white wine she kept in her apartment. If I mentioned the wine she had already had that evening, she would blame me. “I’m only drinking because you’re my guest. I don’t keep wine in this house.”

  Prior to the Fourth of July celebrations of 1990, Jo told me she would like to get together with me to “do something.” This was not an idea I relished, as previous meetings with her had not turned out to be pleasant, and she enjoyed creating a scene. Jo liked dining at a diner then at the corner of Broadway and West Seventy-ninth Street, clad only in the mink coat she had purchased for the premiere of I’ll Cry Tomorrow. She made no effort to keep the coat around her nude, aged body. If clerks were inattentive or lines too long at the few stores she frequented, Jo would simply steal the handful of items she had collected. The store owners witnessed this and did nothing; they felt sorry for her and turned away during the commission of her crimes.

  One day, Jo called my number and left nearly twenty messages for me. When I played them back and wrote them down, I didn’t hear the words of a drunk woman growing increasingly angry with me for not being available. I heard a prayer.

  “This is Jo Van Fleet. I would really, really like to not be alone tomorrow. Do you think you could be with me tomorrow? Tomorrow will be really terrible for me if I’m alone, again. This is Jo Van Fleet, and I’m always alone. Why do I have to be alone? You’re not alone? Do you want to be with me? Would you like to get together with me? I don’t want to be alone. Please don’t let me be alone. This is Jo Van Fleet. I’m still alone. I still haven’t heard from you. I need to hear from you. This is Jo Van Fleet. If we could just get together, I think I would be well enough to get on with things. I think I could feel better. I can’t be alone. Can you come over? This is Jo Van Fleet. If I could just hear your voice, I would feel better. I wouldn’t even care if you couldn’t come over. But I can’t be alone. Please don’t let me be alone.”

  “She had an evil about her that vibrated,” Jerome Robbins would tell me, even as he admitted that when he directed her he felt he was witnessing one of “the greatest theatrical talents we would have, but one that wasn’t properly harnessed.”

  “I would be happy,” Jo told me once, “if just one person—one person!—would admit to me what I was. A great actress. Somebody!”

  On one of our walks, Jo told me she needed some things from a drugstore. The store we entered, now long replaced, was at Broadway and Eightieth Street. Jo moved through the aisles with agonizing slowness (she was both tired a
nd drunk), but she finally made it to the register and placed her few things in front of the bored cashier. When Jo attempted to pay for her items with a check, the cashier asked for some identification. Jo reached into her tote bag, hauled out her Oscar, and proudly and loudly slammed it on the counter. “This is who I am!”

  Jo’s check was accepted, and she was happier that day than I had ever seen her.

  WHILE JO VAN FLEET’S identity crisis revolved around her recognition as someone of merit (both by herself and by others), Mildred Natwick seemed to perpetually ask herself who she was, ever had been, or was meant to be. Jo’s rage stemmed from her sense that she was a talented, intelligent actress who had been mistreated and abandoned, while Millie was a grateful actress who wondered if she had done, or could do, enough to fulfill her destiny.

  Jo was perpetually angry; Millie was unceasingly happy, upbeat, bemused. Nothing was ever presented to Jo that couldn’t serve as proof that life was utterly miserable and untenable; nothing appeared to Millie that wasn’t a blessing, and further proof that life was merely the raw material that was presented to us for the crafting of our identities.

  When Jo walked about Manhattan, she was passing the locations of past triumphs and humiliations, both of which served to set her off in a rage. When Millie moved about Manhattan, she was, first and foremost, grateful that she was still ambulatory. “I take nothing for granted,” she once told me, “and I feel that that’s why nothing I ever really needed has ever been taken from me.” Life was full of conflicts for Millie, but she refused to see them as evil or debilitating. One of her favorite quotes from Mary Baker Eddy was as imprinted on her brain as the Episcopalian prayers had been on Tenn’s: “Hold thought steadfastly to the enduring, the good, and the true, and you will bring these into your experience proportionably to their occupancy of your thoughts.” When I asked her one day how she managed to avoid the pettiness that had engulfed so many others in her profession, she replied, “I guess I just didn’t see anything that would force me to debase myself or someone else. I was lucky enough to find a means of seeing things that were real and things that weren’t real. I discarded the unreal.”

  SITTING IN THE ROOM at the Royal Orleans, reflecting on Jo Van Fleet, Tenn became decidedly morose, morbid. He rose from the bed and looked out the window for a long stretch of time. I asked what was wrong. “Jo has brought into my mind Rachel Roberts,” Tenn told me. Two years before our meeting, in late summer 1980, Rachel Roberts had committed suicide, in Los Angeles, by swallowing a caustic substance—believed to be Drano or some other toxic drain cleaner—and had then been propelled by pain to crash through a glass pane and die, scratched and scalded, in her verdant backyard. “Brilliant women destroying themselves,” Tenn said. “Rachel called women—brilliant women—late in the night, hectoring them for having values, standards, the good sense to avoid her. I loved her, but, I realize now, I avoided her as I avoided Jo: you cannot sustain their company for long, even as you long for their talents.”

  Tenn returned to the bed and told me he wanted to dictate some ideas he had for a profile of Rachel Roberts.

  “This will be a tale of gifts that went begging. This will be a tale of gifts that burn and decimate and move swiftly to the next area of destruction. This will be a tale of Rachel Roberts.”

  Employing the style of Marguerite Duras and the biography of Rachel Roberts, an actress of “diabolical brilliance, a suicide, a Cassandra of the arts,” Tenn thought he had the beginning of a profile, an exploration. “I did not care for my autobiography,” Tenn told me. “The true story of my life is one that should be told through my influences—those I utilized well and those I failed to utilize at all. I never have and I never will exist without the gifts—shared and studied—of a remarkable group of women.

  “Much like Jo Van Fleet, Rachel could find little satisfaction in her talent, and absolutely none in the venues in which it was presented. Resentment was a perfume that surrounded her, cloaked her, made breathing in her presence difficult. Some of this was deserved, I suppose, but I have come to see the effects—the poisonous effects—of holding a grudge, harboring resentments, judging every act, gesture, karmic flip of the cards. There is no way to be gracious in the face of injustice, I imagine, and Rachel was so much better than her material or her memory will reveal, and the few acts of benevolence that were shown to her she chose to destroy. So do we cast her aside? Do we dismiss her as a difficult woman who got what she deserved? Do we fail to study and marvel at her gifts simply because to do so would reveal too many unpalatable truths about talent and its cultivation and its strength and its standing in the world?

  “I think that we want to believe that happiness, or, at best, satisfaction, accrues to those who have given us pleasure or elucidation or inspiration. Our work can do this for us, but it requires an understanding both of the art and of ourselves for this to exist. Rachel did not possess this understanding; Rachel did not enjoy her own presence unless she was in the process of working, and working well, on a part in a good play with a cast from whom she could garner experience and respect and a decent drink at the end of the day. She expected too much too often, but her diabolical demands led to her extraordinary work, even as it made her passive hours—the quiet, nonworking hours—so hellish.”

  Tenn had photographs of Rachel Roberts tucked into a journal, along with several pages of notes that had been torn from various pads and notebooks.

  “Her eyes see everything and like nothing.

  “Such a hard jaw, purpose and hunger and power to move forward.

  “Hers is a face in front of the open door that holds the bad news, the fateful telegram, the unfaithful lover locked in the arms of another. She has always just been given the news that none of us has the strength to hear. She tries to hear it, but it destroys her.

  “She swallowed a corrosive substance, silencing the voice, stopping the heart, sizzling the brain, but long before she ventured into her kitchen and found that brightly advertised cleaning agent and swallowed it, she had swallowed so many bitter things: the truth about our theater, our culture, our world. She had come to see how we lie to ourselves and to each other about what will be, what will come, what will happen if we do the right things or if we fight to make things better or if we just give up.

  “She seemed to know the score, and there is something to be said for the divinity of ignorance.

  “I saw Rex Harrison not long after her self-murder, that Isadora-like dance she choreographed that ended in shattered glass and silence. I wanted to know if she had truly hated herself that much, that fervently. No, he told me, forever unflappable, so smooth—she had hated us that much, and that acidic toast was her final fuck-you to the world that had so disappointed her. She had married him in the belief that fame and money and good wines and good linens and a castle in the hills could make her happy, make her matter, shove her to a place she belonged—the center of attention.

  “Myths. Delusions. How many corrosive things had she swallowed in the villa in the hills? How many have I swallowed? Have we all swallowed?

  “I never hated her, and she never disappointed me. I think it is safe to say that she never disappointed an audience or a playwright or an actor who had high standards and a thick skin. Yes, she would call in the night and hector and criticize: she knew all of my flaws and my weaknesses and my own travel kit of myths and delusions. She was always correct, and she was always able to tell me how I could improve myself. I didn’t want to hear it, and I didn’t have the strength, the will, the courage to take her advice or to see the damage I had done, but she offered it, she was right, and she was angry.

  “There is no way to do things well and gently and consistently. There can be no satisfaction anywhere and with anything until we can accept the flawed and unique prisoners we are—prisoners to our memories and the distinct mechanisms we have for sharing them. I do not have this gift—a sort of faith is what it is. Rachel didn’t have it either. I have her face in my memory a
nd that voice and that brutal detail she brought to her work and to her life and to every conversation we ever had.

  “We let her down. She destroyed herself. There is no happy ending here and harsh reminders of what awaits some of us. I feel the incredible need for some reason to apologize to her. I will write words, plays, memorials.

  “I will try, however I can, to throw some light her way.”

  Tenn concluded his comments, then retreated to the bathroom.

  AS THE YEARS PASSED, I saw less and less of Jo. In fact, I don’t know when she moved from the Riverside Drive apartment, and I was shocked to pick up The New York Times on that summer day in 1996 to see that she had died in a hospital in Queens. I did not attend her funeral service at the Actors Studio, but I was told that her son read from the notes I had given her from my meetings with Tenn.

  And yet I would see Jo still making her arduous walks about the neighborhood, and she was confused as the neighborhood changed, as the reasonably priced Greek diner gave way to the posh takeout shop, as her drugstore gave way to a GNC health store. Every day, at virtually the same time, she would walk in and tell the perplexed staff what used to reside in that space and tell them who she was. She became the resident crazy lady, but a counterperson at Zabar’s told me that they often gave her free food because she was so poor. Jo was not, in fact, poor: her pensions, and those of her husband, who died in late 1990, were sufficient to support her. But many of us, myself included, continued to leave her food or money or books, always imploring her doorman not to tell her who had left them.

  And yet … As we were cleaning up Barbara Baxley’s apartment after her death, Oli Brubeck, one of Barbara’s oldest friends, noticed that there were messages on the answering machine, and she decided to listen to them. Most were from before Barbara’s death, calls from friends, confirmations of appointments, but finally, at the end of the tape was a small, sad voice that said, “Oh, Barbara, I’m so sorry you died.” It was Jo Van Fleet.