No matter the play?
“No matter the play,” she told me. “The play is irrelevant, the text doesn’t matter. My story was the primary one, slipped under and between every action and every character. That was my motivation, and that is what Lee gave me to work with.”
And?
“And I now see how incredibly fucked up that was—and is,” she told me.
“Kim Stanley worked very hard—and very well—on improving my spiritual life,” Tenn said. Stanley introduced him to the writings of Martin Buber, a philosopher whose worldview was uncannily similar to Stanley’s idea of acting, of artistic purity. “Acting is constant discovery,” Kim told me, “and it requires an acute awareness, but it also requires a foundation that is bigger than we are, and Buber drew me toward that foundation. I wanted Tennessee to stand on that foundation—any foundation—and know that he was safe to write and to live. I wanted him to stop reacting—I wanted us both to stop reacting—in the dangerous, unbalanced way we always did, and I thought Buber could help him with this.”
Stanley’s favorite quote from Buber: “I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a man’s life. As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience.”
I asked Stanley what the quote meant to her. “When I found that quote, it helped me to realize that I couldn’t rely on Lee Strasberg—or anyone—to tell me how to act. I could not rely on any therapist to tell me what dreams meant or what imagery there was in my life or how it might be controlled by me. I saw that I could not remain the frightened, angry girl terrified in her bed at night, waiting for abuse that I somehow felt I deserved. I realized that the foundation on which I should be standing and from which I could begin a heightened awareness of living was my responsibility. I was the foundation. And Tennessee was his foundation, and I hoped that I—with my shattered background and my shared addictions and patterns—could be the one to lead him to that foundation.”
By the time I came to know Kim Stanley, she had made several attempts to curb her alcoholism and to quell her anger. With the memorized words of Martin Buber, she came to believe that “the world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings,” a maxim that helped her to deal with her past and her parents. The study of Buber also helped her to realize that sin could not be uprooted from the human soul—only forgiven and repeatedly dealt with, studied. “I had studied every inch of my psyche,” Stanley admitted, “but toward the goal of achieving something on the stage. I now wanted to achieve something in the here and now, in real time. I wanted to be a good mother to my children; I wanted to function in the world without drugs or alcohol.” Stanley was appalled at the arrogance and the abuse she had displayed so fruitfully in the years she was working: she rarely completed her commitment to a play, leaving amid lawsuits and enraged ticket holders. “I had allowed myself to believe that my talent was a privilege that only a few were entitled to share or to see,” she told me. “I felt no responsibility to any writer or director or actor. I was beholden only to my talent, to the use of it in a performance that was then laid out for that audience of three.” However, of that audience of three, only one person—Lee Strasberg—was in attendance. The others were spectral, even if they sparked most of the rage that fueled her performances.
Kim Stanley’s dependence on and respect for Lee Strasberg began to wane when she came to realize that he did not have the slavish devotion to his own teachings that he forced upon his students. “There were the canonical teachings,” Stanley remembered, “the same quotes, the same advisements, over and over. The private sessions where he told me, over and over, that I had failed. He had not failed. The Method had not failed. It was exactly like the people in churches who can never feel comfort from the sermons: it is always their fault; it is always a failure of faith, of application.”
In the early 1960s, at precisely the same time Elia Kazan was preparing his Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center, Lee Strasberg announced the formation of the Actors Studio Theatre, which would be the culmination of everything he had ever hoped to achieve: a devoted company of actors taking on the great plays and utilizing the Method as fashioned and taught by Lee Strasberg. Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was considered by many to be the ideal play to launch this new enterprise; instead, the Actors Studio Theatre, in Stanley’s words, devoted itself to “dead or very bad playwrights,” opening its first season with Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, appropriately enough a play about the wonders of analysis and self-awareness (“right up Lee’s alley,” Stanley cracked), and concluding with Randall Jarrell’s adaptation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, which would star both Stanley and Geraldine Page.
Opinions vary on the production of The Three Sisters. Eva Le Gallienne called it a “mess, the after-effects of a huge accident, in which victims are racing about, frightened, confused, unaware of their surroundings.” Uta Hagen, who might have felt some resentment toward a fellow acting teacher, was amazed that a cast of talented actors, “people whose worth I knew, whose talents were unmistakable,” were “so adrift. There was no cohesion at all in the production. You could not imagine that anyone in the play was related, or had even met each other before.”
The Three Sisters had its admirers, however. The reviews were, for the most part, positive, and Kazan enviously noted that in its first season, the Actors Studio Theatre was far more successful than his own efforts at Lincoln Center. “It looked as if we would fail,” Kazan told me, “and Lee would have the national theater that our country has always needed. I never felt that Lee deserved to have that happen for him, not merely because I disliked the man and thought his talents slim and poorly utilized, but because I knew that he could never sustain the effort, could never hold together the people required to have such a theater happen. I knew he would alienate everyone.”
Strasberg did just that when The Three Sisters was performed in London, at the Aldwych Theatre, in 1965, and was savagely dismissed by British audiences and critics. “It was horrible,” Stanley remembered, “and we deserved the abuse. The story you heard—and probably still hear—around the Studio is that the British didn’t supply us with the proper rehearsal space, or the stage of the theater was poorly conceived, or the lighting board was insufficient. Well, the problem was the arrogance of the company, which felt that our greatness was both obvious and settled: we only had to show up and show those stuffy British actors and theatergoers how theater was done, what real emotion and experience looked like. We ignored the rehearsals we obviously needed. We prepared nothing. We had been told—and we believed—that we were great.”
Stanley could survive the brickbats that were thrown her way after the Three Sisters debacle, but she was not prepared for Strasberg’s treatment of the company. “It was entirely our fault,” Stanley remembered. “He stood on the stage of that theater the morning after the opening and told us the critics and the audiences were correct: We were horrible.” Strasberg took no responsibility for the production, and proceeded to lay the blame on the company. “Here was my teacher,” Stanley remembered, “the man who had asked me, forced me, to trust him, to reveal to him everything about myself, in whom I had put my complete trust, and he was disowning all of us, criticizing all of us.”
Barbara Baxley and George C. Scott offered verbal responses to Strasberg, tough and combative, and Scott even physically threatened him. Stanley was in a daze. “I am now grateful for that realization,” she said. “My eyes were opened. I saw that I had done everything wrong, I had botched everything. I had never understood what acting or the theater was all about.”
At the conclusion of her time in The Three Sisters, Kim Stanley was in her early forties, but a visit to her physician revealed
her to be in a state of medical crisis: she was severely overweight, her “blood numbers” were astronomical, and there was evidence, even then, of liver damage. “I was in terrible shape,” she recalled. “I was young, but I looked old, and I felt ancient.” Unable and unwilling to work, Stanley retreated to books, finding solace in a particular quote by Buber, which she shared, at one point, with Tenn: “To be old can be glorious if one has not unlearned how to begin.”
The drinking continued, as did a dependence on Seconal and Nembutal, but eventually Stanley found direction for her talents and her energies through teaching. “I failed miserably at Santa Fe,” she told me, referring to her tenure at the College of Santa Fe, where she managed to lure Maureen Stapleton for a production of Waiting for Godot, but where she also directed Greer Garson in a production of The Madwoman of Chaillot, which she played, according to Stanley, “exactly as if she were Auntie Mame. That was the nadir.”
After teaching in New York for a number of years, heavily subsidized by friends, including Tenn, she moved to Los Angeles, where her home served as her acting studio. “I discovered something fascinating,” she told me. “I had read biographies of actresses, and I had read plays, and my thoughts were always of escape—from home, from myself, from whatever despair I had to endure. I read books and plays again and I did not find escape: I found revelations. My point should never have been to remove myself from the life into which I had been born, but to come to terms with it. My point should never have been to overturn the relationships I had with people who abused me, but to repair and forgive them, and everything I ever needed for those acts is in works of literature and music and art, and of course they are also all within, and art takes you within, gives you some parameters for moving around inside yourself and figuring things out.”
The sharing of oneself through writing or acting or painting always involves the sharing of one’s data, including our most intense data—the fears, the regrets, the hopes. But we need to apply a process to our biographies before we commit them to the page or the workshop or the rehearsal room. Think of it as a cleansing process or the burning down of materials needed to make gold—fires to the fear. Remove the biography from the merely personal and apply it to something bigger than yourself, beyond yourself. The act of sharing must begin. Steps must be gentle.
After nearly two decades of inactivity, Kim Stanley returned to acting. “I wanted to see how I would do it with my new mind and my new eyes and my new legs,” she told me. “I wasn’t as strong as I had been, and I had limitations—physical limitations—that I hadn’t had before, but I was so much clearer than I had been before. I understood what being an actress meant in a way I hadn’t before.”
Stanley was well received in the film biography Frances, in which she appeared with one of her students, Jessica Lange. “Jessie was ballast for me,” Stanley told me. “She knew the rudiments of filmmaking, as I didn’t. I had always gone into my character and expected—demanded—that I be followed. I had never thought to learn how a film was made, or how people conserved and utilized their energies. I felt like that young girl just beginning my studies again.” Stanley earned an Oscar nomination for her performance, her second. (Her first, in 1965, had been for Séance on a Wet Afternoon, when she lost, incongruously, to Julie Andrews for Mary Poppins.)
As part of the great reclamation project she had undertaken, Stanley resumed long phone calls with Tenn, and she sought out the advice of people she had once ridiculed or openly rebuked. Phone calls were made to Eva Le Gallienne, who accepted them with curiosity and confusion, wherein Stanley apologized for her vehement dismissal of all that Le Gallienne had stood for. “It is terribly confusing to accept such a phone call,” Le Gallienne remembered. “I had no idea I had held such a place in Kim Stanley’s mind for so long,” she recalled, “or that I had annoyed her so. Now I learned that she felt she had been wrong, and she told me all that she had learned from my example.” Stanley hoped to create a theater, a company of players, to examine and exalt and mount the great plays, and she looked to Le Gallienne for advice. When these phone calls took place, Le Gallienne was in her late eighties and Stanley in her late sixties, but both believed that the dreams discussed were possible to attain, if only Stanley could stop drinking. “We talked about alcoholism,” Le Gallienne told me, “and she was looking for nostrums, hopes, plans, and I had to tell her that there is only one way, only one means of victory over alcohol. You stop using it. Period. It’s difficult, I assure you, but it is the only way.” The advice offered seemed dry and less than inspirational to Stanley, but she kept trying to put the drinking behind her. “You cannot remove from your life the situations that cause you to drink,” Stanley told me, “so I was trying to reeducate my mind so that the same situations wouldn’t lead me to crave the slow, sweet death that alcohol brought me.”
Stanley was involved in re-education until the day she died.
She came to forgive Lee Strasberg. “He was a great teacher,” she told me, “even if he was not a great man or a great director. He had an extraordinary eye for detail, and an extraordinary ear. He could see and hear your weaknesses and your needs, and he could tell when you were lying. He took these gifts into places and situations he shouldn’t have, but I was not a passive person. I was his willing victim and partner. I profited, in bizarre and painful ways, from our times together. I wish I had been more fully present for my work in those years, those good years when I got work, but I was hidden beneath layers of anger and alcohol and this insane form of analysis Lee and I had constructed.”
Tenn had told me that I would need to learn the art of navigation. He also told me that it was an art very few had mastered, that almost everyone he had known failed, significantly, in its execution. “Choices are offered,” he said, “avenues opened, and you take the step and you wait to see what you’ll find on this particular journey. None of us knows what the right thing to do is, not even at all times in hindsight, but it is better to be prepared for the journey, to have the Dopp kit of the prepared traveler, to be a smart pilgrim.”
I last spoke to Kim Stanley in 1999, at a time when she was riddled with health problems and obsessed with problems that were visiting her grandchildren and friends. One of her salvations, she told me, was the study of plays, particularly those in which she had appeared. She read in amazement Lillian Hellman’s Montserrat, Inge’s Picnic and Bus Stop and Natural Affection, Anita Loos’s Chéri, O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet, Arthur Laurents’s A Clearing in the Woods, various versions of The Three Sisters. She imagined taking on these roles again, investing them with the person she now was, with the clarity she now possessed. “I had gifts,” she told me, “but so frequently they were poorly applied, badly used. I now have a mental theater, like Tennessee’s, and I can place myself on its stage and imagine that I’m assuming these roles again, from a better perspective.”
She rediscovered Shaw and Beckett and Pinter, and she forced herself to read all of the works of Edward Albee, an act that represented great courage for her, since she had humiliated herself at a rehearsal for the film version of A Delicate Balance, where, in the company of the film’s director, Tony Richardson, and her costars, Paul Scofield, Katharine Hepburn, Lee Remick, Joseph Cotten, and Betsy Blair, she chose to reveal, in her estimation, the true “alcoholic and beastly and bestial nature” of the character Claire.
“I was out of control,” she remembered, “and I was drunk, and I was angry. I chose to let everyone in the room know that this was not merely a play. This nightmare of a person was alive and well and in their midst.” Writhing on the floor, drooling, touching herself, Stanley turned a reading into something “out of Bosch.” Her good friend Tony Richardson was forced to fire her, after both Scofield and Hepburn lodged complaints. Scofield refused to speak to or about Stanley in our conversations, but when Hepburn was told that Stanley still felt remorse and shame about the incident, she offered a response.
Asking me to take dictation from her, Hepburn urged
me to tell Kim Stanley that “we all have, I assure you, moments in our lives that offer us pain and enlightenment. You are far too talented to waste your time and your energy on a moment that is gone, that is forgotten, that has taught you something. At the end of the day—at the end of all the days—we have precisely what we need to move on and do what we must.”
I read the words to Stanley over the phone, and she asked me to type them up and send them to her. When she received them, she called and told me that she was aware of so many blocks that had been removed from her path, from her vision. “I can finally see and move as I should,” she told me. “This is what I wish for everyone. It’s what I always wanted to give to my students. It’s the purest state of being, to always be moving forward, open and aware.”
Marlon Brando had a desire to reconnect with Stanley, whose talent he admired so much and about whom he was most frequently asked. “What was so remarkable about Kim?” Brando responded to me late one night:
When she was truly focused and properly challenged, she had the ability to transmit the reality of human agitation, anguish, elation, concentration better than anyone else. There was a sense of embarrassment in watching Kim when everything worked, because you felt you were violating the confidences of a vulnerable woman, reading the pages of a diary carelessly left open for other eyes. She had the effect—on me, at any rate—of peeling layer after layer apart, from her soul outward, and this must have been exhausting. She is a brilliant actress who was tragically denied a long career—a career deserving of her talent. I would do Kim a dishonor, I think, if I pitied her. The past is gone, yes, but the past is full of Kim’s brilliance, and I think we—I think you—need to remind people of what they didn’t see and can’t understand. When people ask about Kim, I talk about things that no longer exist, in my opinion: passion, genius, truth, danger, fearless exploration. Maybe someone like Kim wasn’t meant to last long on the stage—it may be too much for most to handle. Many an actor walks—lamely, I might add—in lanes she hacked free, cleared, paved, and then left, and they have not been suitably tended since.
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