Follies of God

by James Grissom

  Stanley told me that she earned a master’s degree from a school in New Mexico—when it was not in Texas. A brilliant student, she studied a program of varied subjects, majoring, she insisted, in biography. “I wanted to learn about other people’s lives,” she told me. “I wanted to know points of departure, means of escape. I could escape mentally by remembering things I’d read, snatches of song, but now I wanted to get away, to plan and execute an actual means of escape from where I was.”

  The lives of actresses fascinated Stanley, and she read their biographies and articles in magazines like Theatre Arts, and she claimed to have seen Katharine Cornell when the actress toured Texas in the early 1940s. “Oh, I followed her across the state!” Stanley exulted. “I thought she was so beautiful, so composed. We sat and sweltered in our seats, but she glided across the stage, gorgeously costumed, dry as a bone, beautiful, every syllable perfect. I could see the words on the page she had memorized.” Stanley went to bed each night, alone or with uninvited guests, imagining a blank page onto which she affixed facts learned, dreams pursued, revenge sought. Tenn had his mental theater, and Kim Stanley had her psychic diary, which she kept until her death. After seeing Cornell on the stage, Stanley imagined herself beautiful and well arranged, proper. It was inconceivable to Stanley that a person of Katharine Cornell’s bearing might ever be used as she had been. “The blame began,” Stanley told me. “I had been the sort of person, the sort of undeserving, aberrant person who should always earn her place by being smart or pretty or funny or useful in ways devised by men in the hot night.” Katharine Cornell, or any well-preserved and well-presented person, would not be treated so badly.

  “Katharine Cornell got me out of the mind-set I had known in Texas,” Stanley confessed, “but I came to despise her style of acting. It wasn’t real, it wasn’t about real people. It was entertainment. Yokels like me, at that point, who had never seen anything like her, could be removed, for a moment, from our real lives and imagine something else, but I wanted to be a character in plays that made people realize that somewhere, right now, there was a girl in a bedroom making lists on a mental sheet of paper of how to survive and escape and be something else, someplace else. I then fell in love with Vivien Leigh. All the things I work so hard to achieve—truth, detail, emotional honesty—Vivien Leigh walked on the stage with. Katharine Cornell overwhelmed me when I was a young girl and I saw her onstage, because I had never seen anyone so pretty and cool and composed. Vivien Leigh had the assurance of Katharine Cornell, an ability to bring a profound light on a stage or press it into film, and then scare the hell out of you with some emotional truths that were so intense you wanted to look away. I did a couple of plays—Chéri and A Far Country—and I needed a particular look, a particular and exact way of looking and moving, and I would think of her and the way she removed a glove while breaking your heart or sauntered across a stage while planning the most diabolical revenge. I think she was remarkable, and she got me through some of those bad years. She gave me a fantasy or two.”

  Stanley spent time in California, ultimately claiming that such places as the Pasadena Playhouse held no interest for her. “I was bigger, even then, than the Pasadena Playhouse,” she boasted, “so I went to New York. It was inevitable. My relationship with New York was like the relationship between Blanche and Stanley. When I got off that bus and hit that pavement, I said to that city, ‘We’ve both known this was bound to happen!’ I was where I belonged.”

  She lived in squalor—hot, small rooms that she rented by the week, with bedbugs and shared bathrooms, but she didn’t care. By day she modeled for Jacques Fath and Pierre Balmain. “I had a good figure and blond hair,” she told me, “and that’s all you needed for the kinds of shows I did. No one got too close to you, so they couldn’t see that I’d been up all night, reading or drinking or fooling around. They couldn’t see that I sometimes ran out of the apartment without putting on makeup. They were looking at the dresses, these awful buyers for stores all across the country, they weren’t looking at our faces.” Sometimes they did look at the faces and they sought contact. “They were good for a dinner and a twenty,” Stanley told me. “They thought we were glamorous and had spectacular lives, and I made them believe that I did. I told them about plays I’d been in, which of course had not been written yet, and offers made that were entirely imaginary. I was acting, you see. I was training myself, and they, these men from Nebraska and Kansas and Florida and Michigan, could put aside their own mean and little lives, with their wives and mortgage payments and ledgers and spend some time with an actress. I would get a steak and a night in a clean hotel. These were my first acting jobs.”

  Tenn remembered that when he met Stanley, not long after the premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire, she seemed very extreme, very odd. “I was not aware of such a thing as a beatnik or a hippie at that time,” he told me, “but that is the best description I can offer of the woman I met at that time—disheveled, very opinionated, wildly inappropriate in her expressions of feelings and desires. I was amused by her, but I also wanted to guard myself against her. She was clearly dangerous.”

  Kim picked up jobs in touring companies, repertory theaters. She picked up a husband, a fellow actor, but this arrangement did nothing to curtail her ravenous interest in the company of men. “I was out there all the time,” she told me, “like I was still at that dinner table with my father, making my points, making my case, trying to get his attention. I just went around looking for a man who would treat me as I thought I should be treated. I had a series of scenarios in my mind of how I should be treated, of how conversations ought to proceed, but I kept finding the same men and the same outcomes.” This began to change for Stanley when she studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, and she found a man who would, at last, listen to her, argue with her, give her the benefit of the doubt. Strasberg affirmed her talent and her intelligence, but he also lured her closer to him by offering advice, training, secrets that would open her up to becoming a better actress, a better person. “He was my guru, my church, my salvation,” Stanley told me. “It would later fall apart, and there would be the great Reformation of my life that resembled Martin Luther’s. I renounced Lee Strasberg, but that came years after I submitted to him completely.”

  Marlon Brando befriended Stanley at roughly the same time as her conversion to the tenets of the Actors Studio. Although Brando’s name is one that is routinely highlighted on the roster of Studio alumni, he pointedly told me that he owed nothing to Lee Strasberg or to the place that the Studio became during its peak years in the 1950s. “If you like what I do, what I’ve done,” he told me, “then lay your thanks at the feet of Elia Kazan and Stella Adler. They were my teachers. They kept me focused and in sight of the shore from which I always drifted. I liked a lot of the people who studied with Lee, but I never believed in him or trusted him.”

  Strasberg held a particular power over women who had suffered some trauma, physical or sexual, in their early years, and who now sought some comfort from a paternal influence who could make them feel safe and smart and special. “He fed on the weakest of egos,” Kazan told me. “It was terribly predictable, but then Lee was among the most predictable of all people I’ve ever met. His machinery was exposed when in operation, and he gathered about him those who would completely surrender to him, body and soul, and those whose fame would elevate him. That is Lee Strasberg. That is all you need to know.”

  Tenn did not hold as harsh a view of Strasberg, but he offered a puny endorsement. “Look, the building existed,” he told me. “It was built by Kazan and Clurman, with some janitorial assistance from Cheryl Crawford and Robert Lewis, minor lights who affixed themselves to two giants, two revolutionaries. Those people, for me, are the true Actors Studio, and they had bolder agendas to follow. Strasberg was the one who stayed behind, dragged along on the long tails left by greater men. He was very intelligent, very well read, and actors are not terribly bright, on the whole, and the actors who sought
Lee’s counsel were particularly rough, hard, blank slates with a bright, sharp need to be avenged, somehow, through their work.” This was, of course, something with which Tenn could relate: there was anger in his work as well, and he was attracted to the angry energy he always found at the Studio.

  Lee Strasberg was for many—and particularly for Kim Stanley—an acting teacher, a guru, a best friend, and a lover. “I didn’t think I could do anything—anything at all—without his approval,” Stanley said. (illustration credit 16.3)

  “My anger was constructed, worked out, smoothed over in a room where I was alone, and my demons were on paper,” he told me, “but at the Studio, there was shared space—in a former church, God help us, with all the attendant ghosts and memories—and a leader, a flawed guru, urging everyone to expose themselves, their weaknesses, their desires, and to use them in the development of actors and plays and lives. I found it fascinating but evil.”

  Kim Stanley adored the Studio, and she adored Lee Strasberg. “Lee took the mental diary I had,” she told me, “looked at what I had written on the pages, and put it on real pieces of paper, and he put them at the top of his priorities. I had never lived on a schedule before, and he gave me one. There were classes, there were auditions, there were rounds to be made. He gave a shape to my days and to my mind. He told me what I should eat, how to take care of myself. He loved me and he made love to me. There was nothing furtive or hurried or deep in the night about his affection.”

  Stanley got jobs and her work was noticed, but it wasn’t until she began to attend Strasberg’s private sessions, as well as therapy sessions with a psychiatrist of his choosing, that her work became the emotionally intense, almost unbearable experience people now describe.

  The first stage performance of Kim Stanley’s that Tenn could recall was in a short-lived production of The Chase, written by Horton Foote, and starring Kim Hunter, who invited him. “Horton Foote writes very deft and sentimental rough drafts of plays,” Tenn told me. “If you stuck some gingham on Linda Loman and put some oilcloth on the table, and then rather than have Willy kill himself at the end, you have a pie baked or a little boy comforted after a nightmare or a criticism retracted, you could refashion Death of a Salesman into a Horton Foote play. He never cares or reaches for the truth of a play, a big moment, the reality of things. He reaches for the truth of an anecdote, a passing feeling. Old, sad people ignored. Loveless women seeking attention and affection. He writes précis, not plays. I don’t know if his study of Christian Science has done this to him, but the sadness of his plays burns off quickly, through song or faith or sugary will or misunderstanding. A false mysticism hangs over his rooms like an odor of cooking or heat or decay. I find his plays to be remarkably like Mexican food. The ingredients—beans, rice, meat—are either rolled in soft flour or plopped on rigid flour. Whatever you order, you bite into it and you realize there is no difference. The presentation has changed, but the ingredients remain the same.”

  Stanley, however, performed as if the play held for her the truths of the ages, and it was not impressive to Tenn. “It was too much spread across too little,” he remembered, “but it was the work of a good actress in the wrong play. She had been given no direction, or perhaps the director realized that she was the most interesting thing on the stage and gave her over to her intentions.” Hunter performed simply and appropriately and gave an intelligent performance, but Stanley seemed to burn with some undiagnosed fever. It was a style—if one could call it that—that Stanley would replicate when she was cast the following year in William Inge’s Picnic. Tenn saw the production many times, firmly rooted in his competition with Inge, but also intrigued by the work of Stanley and Eileen Heckart. “Eileen Heckart would escape me,” Tenn recalled. “I never had the opportunity to write anything for her, to work with her, but her work in that play was very real, very troubling.” As an aging schoolteacher, desperate for marriage, even to the flabby, unimpressive salesman to whom she’s anchored, Heckart spared neither herself nor her audiences any unattractive aspects of her character’s grasping nature. “I think that a great deal of that play’s success came from the pathos of her performance,” Tenn stated, still unable to attribute anything to its playwright, while Kim, as a tomboyish, bookish girl, was “neurasthenic, agitated, gasping.” Years later, when Tenn wrote Suddenly, Last Summer, he thought of Stanley in the creation of Catherine, the young woman who has seen too much, which she remembers all too vividly, and whose only salvation lay in the scalpel of a surgeon, who is called to lobotomize her, to eradicate her past and her biography. “That is Kim,” Tenn remembered. “Now try to imagine that character wedged onto the stage of a play set in homespun, corn-fed Kansas, where a bevy of horny women lust after cakes and a wandering stud.”

  Tenn could not imagine how a high-school student could have endured or witnessed so much trauma, but the scars were presented by Stanley, in the body language of a girl repeatedly beaten or criticized, and particularly in the speech patterns: a rush of words, a deep intake of breath, the threat of hyperventilation. During the prime of her talents, from 1953 to 1964, Tenn witnessed Kim Stanley on the stage, on television, and in two films, and he was alternately amazed and repulsed by what he saw. “Kim had the capacity to elevate trivial plays,” Tenn told me, “and I never understood why she spent so much time in plays that were simply not good, simply not deserving of her talents.” Elia Kazan believed that she sought minor plays deliberately, as some extremely talented actresses often have as their closest friend a decidedly less gifted actress. “It gives them ballast,” Kazan believed. “They have a confidence with a lesser actress, a lesser play. They are not challenged. They can continue in the confidence of their gifts because no one—certainly not the script—is challenging them, pushing them toward higher goals.” Stanley devoted herself to several plays by Horton Foote, among them A Young Lady of Property, which was presented by Philco Television Playhouse in 1953, and The Traveling Lady, televised by Studio One in Hollywood in 1957. Both survive. Tenn described the former program to me, and recalled that it was his first introduction to Joanne Woodward, who has a supporting part as Stanley’s best friend. Playing a starstruck young girl, almost always without parental supervision, and dreaming of imminent stardom, Stanley radiates a manic energy that was difficult for Tenn to take. By the conclusion of the piece, when Stanley sits on a swing, clutching the chains holding the contraption together, you expect her to tear it apart or to render her hands bloody. She is out of control. Four years later, in The Traveling Lady, Stanley has her bearings, and Tenn was terribly moved by this young mother, her frightened child by her side, waiting for her husband, who is soon to be released from prison. The life she hopes for, for which she has made preparations, will never occur, and you know this from the first scene, from her first nervous giggle and hand to her hair, perpetually making herself presentable, proper—not the wife of a convict and a drunk. “The play is pure soap opera,” Tenn stated, “something out of a ladies’ magazine, but Kim was overwhelming. I felt that she was actively holding back her fear, her disappointment, her immense sadness, and of course it ultimately appeared, and it was wonderful, and horrible, and real.

  “The primary identifying characteristic of Kim’s work,” Tenn told me, “is a suppressed emotion, a manic attack just beneath the surface, a willful pushing down of bile and memory. If this tsunami of rage can be countered by some modicum of comedy”—as in Inge’s Bus Stop—“or a direct line of motivation, as when she played Maggie”—in the London premiere of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof—“there is great effectiveness. Both her character and the actress playing it are working against and with something—a strong text, recognizable emotions, forces beyond her control. But in most of the plays Kim chose to work with, there is nothing but Kim, nothing but emotional excess, undisciplined and messy and with no suitable outlet.”

  Tenn believed that Kim’s talent would have grown and been fully served if she had taken his advice and tackled greater challen
ges in plays that “were as big as she was,” that would have forced her to rise to situations that required more than the tricks she had learned and kept applying to every part. There was talk at some point of her being in a production of Congreve’s Way of the World, as either Millamant or Lady Wishfort, wherever her weight was when rehearsals began. Plays by Shaw and Pirandello were offered to her, too, at a time when her name would have sold tickets, but she refused them.

  Kim Stanley as Maggie the Cat in the London premiere of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in 1958. Seen here with Paul Massie as Brick, Stanley confessed that she only got the part “half right,” because she could not trust herself enough to admit how much she had in common with the character. Twenty-five years later, she would be Big Mama in a television version of the play. “And that I got,” Stanley confessed. (illustration credit 16.4)

  She tried to explain this to me.

  “When I was acting on the stage,” she told me, “I was operating on a series of exercises that Lee had provided to me. My audience was always comprised of three people: my mother, my father, and Lee. I ignored the hundreds of people out there in the seats, and I ignored anything that might have been in the subtext of the plays I was doing. Everything I did was an attempt to have my father and my mother notice who I was and what I had become and what had been done to me, and for Lee to see that I was strong and I had overcome all of these obstacles, these terrible moments in my life, and had brought them to the stage, had made them into a truth that people could see. I wasn’t Katharine Cornell gliding across a stage, composed and serene, with pear-shaped vowels and a caring husband in the wings, but I was a real person, hurt and hurting and trying to make some sense of things.”