As Elia Kazan told me after we spoke of Jo’s obituary in the Times, “We mustn’t cry for her death, but for her life.” I still see her, however, that time with her husband in his hospital room, and even if the performance meant more to her than to him, even if it might have been for her pleasure alone, I remember it as the time she had some sense of peace and control.
MILLIE ATTENDED services at the Third Church of Christ, Scientist on Park Avenue. She invited me to join her for services one Sunday, and afterward we went to a small restaurant that she liked. Millie was in a grave mood on that Sunday, and it was alarming, because while it was common for her to be serious, she had never been so mordant. The previous time I had seen Millie had been at the memorial service for Helen Hayes, and I had assumed that her mien on that day had been due to the grief she felt at the death of a close friend. But I now saw that there was an unraveling effect taking place within and upon Millie, as if she were literally falling apart, and she moved at times like a marionette whose strings had been snipped or loosened. She was still clearheaded and firm and precise, but even her voice had changed, as had her ideas on a few things.
“These women all seem to know what they wanted or what they wanted to do,” she told me in her new apartment, which was a smaller version of her previous penthouse, but still sunny and bright, although today its tenant seemed anything but. “I think I knew, from Christian Science, what I could be and should be, and I used that as my guide to living, as a means to see how I was growing. I could demonstrate to myself how well I was doing by how well I was overcoming any false notions I had as to who and what I was, as well as what others were. Yet I still feel that I didn’t fully develop, except as a student of Christian Science and, perhaps, as an actress. I used to have long conversations with Katharine Cornell about this, but after Guthrie died [in 1961], we didn’t see each other as much, and our relationship grew more polite and accidental. I still loved her, and I still felt her to be the closest thing to a mentor, but the relationship changed. I never could fully divulge how I felt, or about what I wanted to accomplish, but she knew that I was being as truthful with her as I could be.
“Finally, one night, she said that it was difficult to be truly oneself if that self couldn’t find acceptance, if to be what you really were born to be was somehow alien to others or might keep you from functioning at all. Katharine Cornell was a beautiful woman, loved as an actress even by those who only saw pictures of her, because she epitomized what an actress in that day was. She was charming and warm and she surrounded herself with people who never felt as special as they did when in her presence. That is not my presentation to the world. I feel that if I had been true to my emotions and had loved the people I had wanted in the way that I wanted, I would have been seen as sad or sinister, when I don’t feel—and cannot feel—that love, honest affection, can make a person either of those things. Katharine told me that this was how she kept at bay anything negative that might exist in her personality, or that might cause her embarrassment. If she immediately turned her attentions to the work or to her friends and guests, the focus would no longer be on her. No one could hurt her or expose her.
“I did not have her gifts,” Millie continued, “so I put on the mantle of Christian Science and chose to keep myself healthy and pure and of service to others, and to also keep myself from becoming bitter about any lost opportunities I might have suffered. I think you know what I’m telling you. Love whomever you wish, and be generous and open. We place so many spiritual values—golden lights, heavenly views, healing powers—on so many things, but we withhold it from anything that strikes us as odd or alien or costly.” Millie’s sweet smile returned. “I wonder now what Katharine Cornell might have been, what I might have been, if I had the courage to face my feelings and still be healthy, pure, and of service to others.”
I admitted that I had no answers for her, and Tenn had never alluded to any secret self that might have existed within Mildred Natwick. Millie changed the subject, and we continued our visit. The conversation I had with Millie was not, I think, prompted by any dire feelings she might have had about impending death (she lived for another sixteen months), but rather by a sort of reckoning that some of the other women endured when they cleaned out homes and closets and memories, and came across another person they had once known or been.
In our final phone conversations, Millie continued to be upbeat and helpful and curious about anything she encountered, but she was no longer taking her walks, and she missed them. It was not, however, within Millie to bemoan anything, so she quickly added that she had plenty to enjoy right in her apartment, so I shouldn’t feel sorry for her.
Tenn had said, “I wonder if the people we admire and love see themselves as we see them? I’m always surprised when someone I idolize turns out to be as big a mess as I am, but I’m always delighted when I find out that, like me, they have their alternate selves, who walk beside them through life, reminding them of what might be, or could be, or should be. Keep the trains running, honey!”
I walk Millie’s routes on occasion, up and down the East Side, thinking of her, and when I see certain addresses or intersections, I’ll be reminded of a conversation we might have had, and the quotes she felt inspired to share, and which she used for so long to hide what she felt was the unacceptable Mildred Natwick.
“May love and peace cheer your course.”
“Become conscious for a single moment that Life and intelligence are purely spiritual.”
“We should examine ourselves and learn what is the affection and purpose of the heart, for in this way only can we learn what we honestly are.”
And her favorite:
“What we love determines what we are.”
Sixteen
TENN HAD TOLD ME that the ability to succeed in the theater—and life, for that matter—often depended on a person’s ability to withstand whatever had been presented, smile, and say thank you. “The vast majority of expressions of gratitude,” he told me, “are uttered immediately before a retreat.”
We found a café near the hotel and sat at a table for four, spreading the bags and pads generously. “Tell me,” Tenn said, pushing his glasses up to the top of his head. “What is your exact, your precise, definition of faith?”
I had no definition, precise or otherwise, of faith on that day in 1982, and I do not have one today. Neither did Tenn. This was his point, I soon realized, but he wanted to prepare me for the “thicket of nonsense” I was about to enter, the sticky but potentially fascinating field of myth and delusion I would be finding—on his behalf, he understood—discovering if he mattered, if he could survive, if he rested in the memories of the people he used as inspiration, as one of his own systems of faith.
Tenn looked at me and began a series of confessions.
The young boy had hugged a radio in the dark and had hidden in the hallways of rectories and churches and had heard the sorrows and the desires of so many people, and it was all, he realized, fantasy, myth. “The life, our lives,” he told me, present some unalterable and authentic facts. We are born to particular people at particular times in particular places. Geography holds us to a certain, dull reality for a period of time, but the desire to matter, to be noticed and to contribute something, to rise above the mere facts that have been typed onto certificates and into our biological destinies, soon leads us to manufacture our own reality, our own personas.
At a young age, all of us, Tenn believed, begin the act of creating the people we will become, and we use, in this eternal production, whatever tools we may need.
As a child Tenn had the church, which was a theater, whose players gave him characters, structure, the earliest system of organization he would know. People married and found Christ and died and were buried at particular times, in certain cycles. The young Tennessee Williams believed that there was a season of death, because he remembered that certain times of the year seemed flush with funerals and mourning and prayers and houses full of food and r
ecriminations. There were certain types of cakes and vegetable dishes that forever connoted death to Tenn, and he would refuse them. “A Lane cake,” he told me, “or a particular cake of a shiny white, with boiled icing, meant someone had died in the night,” he remembered, and the woman carrying it down the street, its frosting slightly sweating in the heat, was headed for the church or the house of the survivors or a union hall that might now bear bunting or be full of dour relatives and coworkers. “I would follow,” he remembered, “and I would be welcomed. I was the pastor’s little grandson, and some of my family would be there shortly, and I would soon hear the biography of the deceased.” These biographies rose up from grief and guilt and anger and the fear of time lost. The time knot, that massive serpent that crushed life and energy and desire, had come for someone else, and Tenn heard the fear in the voices. A funeral service was the circling of the wagons, with prayers and perhaps pink frosting and the hope of eternal salvation, but, Tenn insisted, “there was still a dead body in the room, and the knot had tightened.”
There was discussion of the dead person’s values and contributions, and Tenn remembered his family often marveling at the revisions the deceased had undergone in the period of time from life to diagnosis to death to ecclesiastical celebration. “If you want to truly be reformed,” his grandfather was once overheard saying to a group of friends, “it’s best to up and die. It does wonders for the soul and the heart and the affections offered.”
All of our biographies, Tenn told me, are born out of fear, are crafted as we jump out of the range of the time knot, cheat it and avoid it. It is unbearable to believe that we may be unnoticed or unloved, so we become what we must to get what we need.
We are born into one identity and we soon learn if we landed on the right side of the tracks, if we fell into the laps of the right people and the better situations. We can jiggle this reality a bit by means of faith. The rustic of the people turn to faith in churches that urge cleanliness of mind and body and a release from the bonds of the earth, of cruel reality, by speaking in tongues, through the agency of God and his many angels, who give wisdom to those who lack food or heat or teeth. These are God’s children who may not matter in the city council or in their schools, but they have a high standing in the “better world.”
The Episcopalians of Tenn’s upbringing were refined people and Christians: they knew their place and it was good. They had no need for superstition, because life had been, for the most part, good to them. They had the nicer homes in the nicer neighborhoods, went to good schools, saw the church as social, a fire around which to gather and commiserate, plan the future, contribute, matter. The Methodists and the Baptists were rural and poor and mean—they needed their God and their faith, harsh and judgmental, to put things in perspective: God had chosen his people, and their respective itineraries of loss and despair and triumph, a scanty sheet of events for which they were to be resigned and grateful while searching for “signs” of what it meant and how they could matter by living with and overcoming whatever it presented. The Catholics lived submerged in myth and its beauty and the fabulist faith that they were covered by a sky full of their own angels and their own God, who knew the numbers of hairs in their heads and who rejoiced that they had joined the true faith and were headed, candle by candle, bead by bead, to their rightful place by His side.
These were the faiths that Tenn and his peers had presented to them, and he sipped at each of their troughs. As he aged and looked around and met other people, he found that there were other means of mattering, and the ability to lie and to craft new identities led to new churches, beliefs, systems of survival. Spirit guides, charts of the sun and the moon, angel visits. Perhaps a guru, and not a God, was called for: Someone hip and corporeal who knew your centers of pain and could coddle and compliment you. “Faith,” Tenn told me, “is the perpetual act of making things work. Fitting what has been given to you into a narrative that pleases you.” Psychiatry presented itself as a religion for those who placed the primary emotions and incentives in the brain—not the soul or the heart, those tertiary organs. It was chemicals and malformations that determined our moods and our destinies, our happiness and productivity. Talk about it or medicate it.
Salvation awaits those who seek it.
Fame and money were belief systems as well, and Tenn began a list of those who had subsumed their talents to the pursuit of both. “They are narcotics,” Tenn told me, “as powerful as any I’ve tried, and every bit as pernicious. They offer their benefit and they exact their cost at precisely the same moment.”
Sex was a church in which Tenn had literally and figuratively knelt, and it burned away as quickly as the youth and beauty that are the costs of admission.
Luchino Visconti would have nothing to do with the concept of any organized set of beliefs, save one. As he explained to Tenn, look to the cultures for revelations: “Visconti invited me into an extended aesthetic and cultural orgasm, training my eye for the color and intricacy of every available moment and every type of person,” Tenn said. “What I learned, and what I want to pass on to you, is this: I must urge you to expand yourself and spend time with people not of your country. The French will teach you what you should hate. The Italians will teach you how to adequately love what you should. The Latins will teach you the majesty of superstition and instinct. The people of Nordic extraction teach us how to clean things and bear up. The Japanese lead us to extremity. Africans will teach you the mystical aspects of the earth, and how to draw power from them. And your American heritage? It has given you the appetite and the entitlement to be rapacious and to take all of these things from all of these people and to hope to be whole.”
The pages filled up, my pen kept racing to capture Tenn’s thoughts, and the coffee kept coming, and Tenn kept on with his pilgrimages to the tiny restroom in the rear of the café.
Tenn returned and asked me to look at the list of topics he had written. The first on the list was “Navigation.”
“Perfect,” he said, and went off, again, to the restroom. “Kim Stanley,” he said as he walked off, and he turned to make sure I had written the name down.
On each of the days we had spent together, Tenn had made references to Kim Stanley. Notes had been scribbled, her name invoked, his eyes rolled in remembrance of time he had spent with her. “Kim is the best of times and the worst of times,” Tenn quipped, “all at the same time, every time.”
A wild and violent woman, with a quick mind and a memory that was at one time remarkable, Stanley had every one of her spigots turned to full force at all times, and damage appeared wherever she rested or cast her gaze. “Kim could not believe that any progress could have been made, in her best interests, until there was serious damage to be found,” Tenn told me. “Serious physical and emotional damage, at which point she felt that her job had been done; she had made her impact.”
Stanley was a tireless and inventive fabulist, and her family history and catalog of experiences varied frequently. The narrative changed to suit her daily need, and she required, at all times, an audience, which was there not only to pay her attention, but to offer, for her many stories, a summation, a defense of her actions, praise for her achievement.
If she was to be believed, Stanley was the daughter of one academic and the niece and cousin of many others, learned and rigid men who forced their erudition and expertise and bodies upon her at an early age. When I made contact with Stanley, in her home on Hillcrest in Los Angeles, she held to this story, made easier to tell, she claimed, by years of therapy and silence and the freedom that certain deaths in a family bring to the survivors.
“I was made, I believe, for abuse,” she told me. “I don’t know if this is something that was decided upon by a God or by fate. It was decided by men, who saw an opportunity and took it. It is what men do.” She stressed the final five words slowly and deliberately, emphasizing each word, then repeating them, then laughing. “I have not had a good time on this earth with men,” she conti
nued. “I was given their abuse for years, and I then went to them, stupidly and blindly and eagerly, for their acceptance and their acknowledgment of what they had done to me. I chained myself to an awful Catherine wheel of rage and booze and sex and protracted scenes of surrender and forgiveness. I have sought out to reform myself thousands of times.”
In the biography she chose to share with me, Kim Stanley spent her childhood in Texas and New Mexico, hot, dry climates where, she remembered, she dressed lightly, moved quickly, and routinely defended her ideas and her body. “I was sexual very early,” she told me. “I was led to believe that this was a natural thing among intelligent and enlightened people. It was a need, like the dip in the pool you needed to survive the afternoon, or the drinks that would help you sleep through the hot night.” Panties were placed in the icebox, a cool towel placed on the neck, and her father, her brothers, perhaps a cousin might visit her, to get through the “beastly night,” she recalled. “All the nights then, and all the nights since,” she said, “have been beastly.” Dinner conversations were debates on literature, biology, physics, history. “I had a good mind,” she told me. “I still have a good mind. It’s full of horrible and outrageous things, but it’s good. It’s helped me to survive.”
A self-confessed fabulist, Kim Stanley, seen here in the 1960s, when she was spending a lot of time with Tennessee, was a brilliant actress and a “tortured woman” who, according to Tennessee, put off the work required of her until she was terrified of attempting it again. She once told him that she would rather jump out of a plane than step on a stage. (illustration credit 16.1)
Kim Stanley saw Katharine Cornell in a 1940s traveling production and decided that she was what all actresses should look like. In the hot, dusty Texas town in which Cornell appeared, she was cool and collected and unafraid. “I looked at my mess of a life,” Stanley said, “and decided that I wanted to move through it like her.” (illustration credit 16.2)
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