Follies of God

by James Grissom

  I read Marlon’s words to Stanley over the phone, and she was stunned, awed. However, she only responded to one aspect of Brando’s praise. “I just don’t see the passion as much as I used to,” she told me. “I see the dream and the aching want, but I don’t see the hungry passion to give up everything else to become a warrior of the art of acting. Religious orders remind me of how I lived when I first began to realize the challenge that was ahead of me. I think a student—a good student—needs to show some penitential study and understanding before they look out and expect some applause and affirmation. I don’t see as many students ready for the long haul as I used to, and I don’t know if my vision is failing or if the students are failing. But it has me down.”

  “Navigation,” Tenn told me, “is not only where you move, but how, and what you take with you.” There was a look at the clock on the wall of the café, another visit to the restroom, and then Tenn returned and removed the envelope from the shopping bag. He slid it across the table to me and asked me to read it. I had, of course, already read it, but I looked over its essentials again. Checkout times, limousine confirmation, flight numbers.

  “Let’s try to make something of this as quickly as possible,” Tenn suggested. “I don’t know what we’ve accomplished so far. I don’t know that I’ve been of any help to you, but I feel that both of us, in our own ways, are staring down roads, looking for some direction. Let’s stay with that.”

  I do not remember if Tenn asked me at that point if I wanted him to continue our discussion. I cannot find the words in my notes, but I do find that I wrote, “It is coming to an end, whatever this has been, and I don’t know what I have or what it adds up to being, or what I’m supposed to do with it.”

  But I stayed. We continued talking.

  Seventeen

  TENN AND I RETURNED to the “secondary” room he had secured at the Royal Orleans, and found it had been cleaned, the piles of papers and notes, shirt boards and paper plates, neatly placed on the dresser and the two bedside tables. Tenn asked me to collect them into one pile so that we could go over them “one last time,” to excavate what we could. He turned on the television set, working with the remote control to bring the volume to the precise point that would allow him to look at its images and “listen for voices” and still talk to me and listen to me read to him. He asked me to call room service and order two buckets of ice (“the large ones,” he insisted, “not the precious ones from banquet services”), a pitcher (“stainless steel, not crystal or glass”) of iced tea, unsweetened, for both of us, a pitcher (“of any derivation”) of orange juice, a bottle of Scotch (“they know my brand”), and anything I might wish to eat. “But please,” he implored, “don’t let it possess an odor. I’m feeling sensitive to scent today.”

  He then went into the bathroom, keeping the door open. As I called room service, I watched him pull a hand towel from a rung on the wall and neatly place it on the porcelain counter, spreading and patting it as if it were flour. When it was in position, bearing no bumps or wrinkles, he reached into his carrying case and placed on it several glassine envelopes and a large prescription bottle, amber-colored, bearing no label. When the towel was covered with these items, resembling a quickly improvised altar bearing a highly improbable Eucharist, Tenn reached behind him with his left foot and slammed the door shut.

  I could not decide at that point if he had wanted me to see this routine: with all of the visits to bathrooms and dark corners and doorways, it had been obvious to me what he might be doing, but he had been careful never to let me see him in the act of using any drug that might be “prohibitive,” as he described them. When I had seen him taking pills, he had told me they were for his blood pressure or his glaucoma or a degenerative disease “related, in a tertiary way, to the connective tissue.” (Carrie Nye told me that, on those rare occasions when Tenn would attempt to dry out or rest or undergo a full physical examination, his treatment was always for “conjunctivitis.”)

  When he came out of the bathroom, Tenn pulled the shades in the room, extinguished every light except for the lamp that was closest to his position on the bed, where he sat, padded from behind, pasha-like, by every pillow from the bed, the closet, and a cushion from one of the chairs in the room. I pulled a chair close to the bed and watched as he placed a moist washcloth over his forehead and eyes. His face was a vivid pink, sweaty, but the rest of his body still showed no signs of sweating, even though he complained of the heat. The thermostat in the room was set to its lowest level, but he continued to complain that the room was too warm. He was silent for several minutes, and he did not move or speak when our room-service order was delivered. He asked for a glass of water, with lots of ice, and a tumbler of Scotch.

  With his face still partially covered by the washcloth, Tenn asked me if I had ever used cocaine. I told him I had, twice, in the summer after high school.

  “Did you like it?” he asked. I told him I had.

  “And you haven’t used it since?” he asked. I told him I hadn’t, because I felt I couldn’t afford it, financially or physically.

  “It is a wonderful, miserable means of temporary happiness,” Tenn told me, still beneath his mask. “It is so clarifying, so healing—in the instant. It is the finest representation of God I have imagined, one I might never have conceived if I hadn’t felt it for myself. I spent so many years—and I still spend so much time—appealing to God, whatever he may ultimately be revealed to be, asking for signs, for aid, for comfort, for understanding, for inspiration. I’m calmed, I’m reassured, I buy a little time, a little corner where inspiration or arousal or awareness may visit, but in minutes or hours or days I’m back in the same state, full of wonder and fear, and I return to my God, and to my ‘gods,’ the pills and the powders. An endless cycle.”

  He removed the washcloth and told me of a night in Key West when he had Truman Capote as his houseguest. The night had been hot, but still comfortable, and the old friends had walked the streets of the old, salty town that Tenn loved so much. They had enjoyed drinks and food, black beans he remembered being as shiny as onyx, pompano in a bag that the waiters had burst with great panache, eliciting silly squeals from Truman, who, on that evening, had been amusing, free of resentment, absent of envy.

  The two had returned to Tenn’s home, where Truman offered the end to the evening and “the beginning of the rest of that night, and the rest of my days.” An enormous bag, normally used for the storage of frozen foods, was plopped on the coffee table. “Treats!” Truman had cooed. Tenn had no idea how to present or display the cocaine, and had only a cheese platter, used at the occasional party, on which to serve the “dessert.” The plate had to be clean, it had to be smooth, it had to be slick. These were the directives shouted by Truman, and Tenn set about washing and patting down the platter, offering it to Truman for inspection, placing it, with painful precision, painstaking adjustment, in the dead center of a coffee table, where the two of them then sat, talking and laughing, passing the platter, back and forth, all night long. They spoke of sentences, phrases, words. Getting the ball rolling. Dropping a word, dropping a memory.

  Tenn and Truman began a game, one they had come to believe might be a writer’s myth, something writers should do, might have considered doing, but never had: offering a word, a sentence, and having their partner take it from there.

  A line of cocaine, a line of prose.

  Tenn tried to remember some of the lines from that night.

  “There were cerulean skies on the night when I killed my son, this I remember,” Truman opened.

  “I was looking at the skies,” Tenn offered, “because I could not look at what I had done.”

  “But it had been something I had needed—and wanted—to do for some time,” Truman bounced back.

  Tennessee envied Truman Capote his success in placing essays in various magazines for high fees. While there was often friction in their relationship, Tennessee recalled that his friend was “a wonderful, traveling show
for a long time.” (illustration credit 17.1)

  “I know that you will not understand my reasons, or me [right now], but you will,” Tenn replied.

  “All of us, you see,” Truman offered, “do what we must. At the conclusion of any tale—moral or otherwise—everyone did precisely as they pleased.”

  The game continued, interrupted by observations on peers and friends and plans, but it grew tiresome, silly, strained. Tenn’s head began to pound—a fissure, he thought, had opened right in the center of his forehead. The only solution was to snort more, to “feed the animal.” Tenn looked over at Truman, crouched over the platter, inhaling one line, then another, then another, a marathon of ingestion. Tenn held out his hand for the platter, for more, for relief. Truman began to offer the platter, but when it was only inches from Tenn’s hand, he snatched it away, positioned it on the coffee table again, and leaned over it. “I’m not happy yet,” Truman announced, and snorted two more enormous lines, “railroad tracks,” Tenn told me, “to oblivion.”

  Tenn sat up slightly and looked at me. “I want you to understand something,” he said, “and I have no way of knowing if this will mean anything to you, now or ever, but there are only two modes in which I have been happy: when I have been deep in my work, and when I have been willfully insensitive. Those are the only states of being I know of that can render a person—this person—happy.”

  Tenn put on his glasses, picked up the television remote control, and began flipping through the channels. He would point the remote at the television and violently press on the buttons, in the belief, perhaps, that the force of his gesture is all that would move the channels, bring on more images, more sounds. Tenn asked for paper, anything on which he could write. I had my booklets, a legal pad. “Something clean,” he said. “For me.” There was nothing in the room—nothing immediately visible—that did not already bear writing, doodles, scratches. I opened the drawers of the dresser and found several pages of hotel stationery. I gave them to Tenn, who placed them on a New Orleans phone directory, which he positioned on his knees. He sat silent for a moment, then began clicking the channels.

  A soap opera. Forty-six seconds, and a dismissive snort.

  A movie commercial, a soap commercial, a game show. Three minutes and a grimace.

  A movie, from the early seventies, on a cable channel. Tenn paused, watched, smiled. He reached for his pen.

  He was faking the fog.

  “WHEN DID YOU turn to this act?” I asked. “When did you start faking the fog?”

  Tenn paused for a moment, put aside the paper on which he was writing, and began to think. “It was in that same year, 1973, when things began to change terribly for me,” he replied. “When I found I could no longer talk to or understand actresses—people in general. I can live, I suppose, without inspiration or input from others, but I can’t survive without a woman to talk to me and through me.” Like the lonely man who has no female company in his life and looks at photographs or videos, manufactures a fantasy life with idealized women whom he can mold and love and move, Tenn had turned to these “distant, divine” representations.

  Ellis Rabb, a man described by Carrie Nye as a hybrid of stork, magician, and lost unicorn, was chosen to direct a twenty-fifth-anniversary production of A Streetcar Named Desire, a decision Tennessee described as catastrophic. (illustration credit 17.2)

  “I had a sort of creative breakdown in 1973,” Tenn continued. “Beyond all of the things that were happening in my personal life, I had a horrible and divisive and explicit moment in that year when I began to be unable to do what I wanted to do and always had done.” He asked for another Scotch, visited the bathroom, and promised to tell me about it.

  Back on the bed, Scotch in hand, Tenn told me that he had approached the twenty-fifth-anniversary revival of Streetcar with excitement and no small amount of hope. It would be produced by the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center and directed by Ellis Rabb, the man who had brought into being the Association of Producing Artists (APA)/Phoenix Repertory Company, and Tenn initially felt good about handing his play over to this “Memphis-born man, queer and bold and manic.” Tenn’s knowledge of Rabb was provided primarily by Carrie Nye, a good friend to both men, Southern and impetuous, who loved and understood Rabb, and by Eva Le Gallienne, who had inspired him to create the APA and who had worked with the company. One of its productions, in 1968, had been Ionesco’s Exit the King, in which Rabb directed Le Gallienne: Tenn saw it, and it led him to believe that prior to the curtain’s rise he had been poisoned by bad food or injected with some new and wild drug. “There was no inherent logic or truth to the production,” Tenn remembered, “and I suddenly recalled that this was a perpetual problem with all of the work coming out of the APA. There was simply no control, or there was only the worst sort of control—a fastidious detail to drapes and clothes and juvenile humor. There was no thread, that thread of which I always speak and for which I always look, that has to hold a company or a play together.”

  Tenn thought the company itself odd, full of people he felt might have been unable to work anywhere else, difficult to cast, impossible to hold in the thought, but all slavishly devoted to Rabb. The only times Tenn had enjoyed the work of the company was in its comedies, light fare that Rabb injected with style and allowed to move at a fast pace. “Empty calories,” Tenn said. “Froth and meringue. At these things the company excelled, but I couldn’t imagine that Rabb could do anything worthwhile with Streetcar.”

  It was Le Gallienne who persuaded Tenn to reconsider his harsh assessment of Rabb, even as she admitted that she had serious problems with his lack of discipline, his crippling depression, his tendency to disappear and to relinquish control of his work. “Can you believe that I heard this litany of concerns and still proceeded?” Tenn asked me in wonder. “I held to Le Gallienne’s plea that I give this man, this man she claimed she loved, a chance to redeem himself, to reclaim a talent in which she believed.”

  “I would do it for you,” she had said to Tenn, a sentiment that moved and enraged him, but which nonetheless led him to accept Rabb as his director, which meant that he automatically accepted his former wife and “artistic channel,” Rosemary Harris, as Blanche DuBois. “And Rosemary Harris pushed me toward the fog,” Tenn told me. “She was the first actress I ever met with whom I could share nothing, offer nothing, expect nothing. I entered an alternate universe.”

  Blanche DuBois and Amanda Wingfield, in Tenn’s biased belief, were roles that greatly tested the actresses who stepped into them. “They require a great deal of self-examination,” he explained. “They insist that you have a heart, and one that you are unafraid to place in the service of a part that will expose you in every way, that will show everyone how you, the actress, judge and accept the fate given to these women. I did not write these parts—or any parts—with the express purpose of taxing women, but each time I see these plays produced, I can see that a woman has been placed in a position she might not be able to handle.”

  Rosemary Harris was a beautiful and talented actress, but Tennessee wanted a friend and a companion during the production of Streetcar, and the reserved, private Harris did not have time for him. (illustration credit 17.3)

  Tenn did not believe that Rosemary Harris could handle Blanche DuBois.

  By the time she took on the role, Harris and Rabb had terminated their marriage, had concluded what Le Gallienne called a “silly charade,” but there remained an interdependence between the two that Tenn found baffling until he found it enraging. “There was a cult around Ellis Rabb,” Tenn told me. “The company acquiesced to him on every matter, even as they walked about on eggshells that the sensitive man might bolt, might go on a bender, might meet a captivating boy, might decide the show might not be in his best interests.” The mere fact that Rabb repeatedly referred to Streetcar as a “show” disturbed the playwright, but Tenn also confessed that he was not in his right mind, not on steady feet that year. “I needed consolation,” he admitted, “a
nd I needed to hear that this play, that any play I had written, mattered and had consequence and deserved to be produced, and I simply didn’t get it.” Instead, he heard, by phone and in meetings he characterized as “bizarre, even by my standards,” what Rabb intended with the play. “He spoke in filmic terms—he wanted wipes and bleeds and blackouts.” He envisioned gauze, membranous fabrics that would cover portions of the stage and at times the characters. This was meant to suggest the occlusion of mental illness, a shattered sensibility. None of this would have been alarming to Tenn, except for the fact that Rabb had yet to describe what Streetcar meant to him, what it was about, what it was saying. “I think it’s a good idea to ask your directors—your potential directors—what your play is about. I have a feeling if I had asked this question of Rabb, he would have told me what I came to suspect to be the truth: Streetcar was about giving Rosemary Harris what she wanted.”

  Tenn had seen Harris in several of her roles at the APA—in Man and Superman, Judith, You Can’t Take It with You—and in her Tony Award–winning role in The Lion in Winter. “I thought her skillful but cold, the type of actress you see if you go to Chichester or any of the other provincial companies in England. They hit their marks, they have a solidity that is admirable, but they do not set your heart or your mind ablaze.” Margaret Leighton, an actress on whom Tenn greatly depended for her tart advice on plays and the requirements of working with actresses, called Tenn to offer advice on Harris. “She told me that Harris was a scullery worker who had put on the clothes of her mistress. The house was vacated for a vacation, and the help, like something out of Genet or, to be less brutal, in a Renoir film, had gone through the clothes and accessories of the owners of the house, their employers, and had dressed up and were walking about, eating the food and sitting in the good chairs and speaking in plummy tones as if the house was theirs. This was all good and fun and fair, but in the end the help can’t pay the mortgage or the utility bills or the grocer. They cannot sell the house and move on to a new life. They are stuck in the pathetic role of playing a part they can never have. ‘This, my darling,’ Leighton told me, ‘is Rosemary Harris. The maid has assumed the leadership of the house—in this instance, your house.’ ”