Follies of God

by James Grissom

  Tenn paused. “And this,” he told me, “is what I walked into.”

  Both Le Gallienne and Nye, however, let it be known that Tenn went into rehearsals for Streetcar in a foul mood. “He was irritable, quick to rage, ready to quit,” Nye remembered. “He went into every meeting, every reading, every rehearsal looking for flaws, and he found them. Of course, you find them everywhere. I asked him if he hadn’t had doubts about Jessica Tandy, if he hadn’t at first vetoed the idea of Kazan casting her.” Tenn agreed with Nye, but added the pathetic rejoinder, “But Jessie always liked me. I could talk to her.”

  This, according to Le Gallienne, was the primary problem: Tenn could not get close to Rosemary Harris, found no comfort in her company, and was offered no flattery or consolation from her. “Rosemary is a cold woman,” Le Gallienne told me, “very private and guarded, but she is a good actress. I thought it foolish that she undertook such a great and exhausting part under the direction of a man from whom she was now divorced, with whom she had a tortured history, but I believe that she went into that part with every intention of giving it everything she had, of making it work.”

  Tenn went to her several times, looking for the friend he needed, an actress to whom he could talk, with whom he could examine the contours of one of his women. He was met with firm and icy resistance.

  When I met Ellis Rabb in 1992, and when I was employed, briefly, as his assistant for a production he was mounting of Paul Osborn’s Morning’s at Seven, he told me that he was met almost daily with the same question from Tenn: “What is wrong with your wife? Why doesn’t she like me?” Rabb would calmly explain that Harris respected him greatly, but her relationship was with the part; there was no time for friendship.

  “In retrospect,” Rabb told me, “it was idiotic of me to have pursued that play at that time, but Le G was right: it was my reformation. My hoped-for reformation.” Plagued by manic depression, alcoholic binges, and periods of doubt that left him “paralyzed, speechless, dumb,” Rabb’s marriage to Harris had ended, and so had the APA. “I met with Le G,” he told me, “and I told her the state I was in. I was brutally honest, and she responded by being brutally honest with me. I had not behaved well in the past. I had not honored the theater in general, or my theater, and my role in my theater, with any degree of dignity or sacrifice. Le G was very big on sacrifice. She would tell us that a mother is said to lose a tooth with each pregnancy—things are needed for the child, the developing baby, and they are pulled from the mother. The teeth suffer. She told me that I had not made the proper sacrifices. I had lost nothing in the pursuit of good theater, only in the pursuit of my own pleasures, and she was right. I had abdicated, as she put it, and I would only become the director and the actor I was born to be by committing myself to greater assignments, test myself, push myself. Lose some teeth.”

  Eva Le Gallienne and Rosemary Harris in the 1975 production of The Royal Family, a summing up of the affection that could exist in and around Ellis Rabb and the work he fostered. It was Le Gallienne who urged Tennessee to accept both Ellis Rabb and Rosemary Harris for the 1973 revival of Streetcar, believing that the duo would bring good things to the play. (illustration credit 17.4)

  Rabb worked to limit his alcohol, and he searched for plays that would tax him, and in those years at Lincoln Center he extended himself with works by Gorky and Shakespeare and, to his highest satisfaction, Tennessee Williams. “It had always been my dream to direct his plays,” Rabb told me, sitting in a restaurant and ordering a Salty Dog, the drink of choice for Le G, and one he drank in her honor. “I understood his plays. I saw myself in The Glass Menagerie because my mother is a vivid dreamer, a woman who lived ambitiously and happily through me, and I saw myself in Streetcar. I identify with Blanche, and I recognize her nervousness, her need to fashion a life, real only to her, to survive and to impress.”

  Born to a comfortable family in Memphis in 1930, one that indulged his love of plays and films and music, Rabb devised a theme, a mantra, a philosophy while still in college: make yourself indispensable to someone as quickly as possible. “I came to New York and looked for someone or someplace to which I could give myself, offer myself, and do everything.” This would be the original Phoenix Theatre, and the two someones were Norris Houghton and T. Edward Hambleton. Under their guidance Rabb did everything: he acted, he read the plays that were sent to the company, he auditioned actors, he built and painted sets, he learned how lights worked, how costumes were built, and he took tickets. “I completely gave myself to them, of course, but to the theater as a whole. I saw every play and musical. I met and talked to actors and directors and designers. I would drive to the country to see actors in repertory companies in Massachusetts and Connecticut. I learned how they had their own philosophies—how companies operated and thought; how they took a play you might think you knew terribly well and present it in a way that was truthful to the text, but that nonetheless opened your eyes to an entirely new way of looking at it, hearing it.” Tall and handsome, with piercing bright eyes and a mellifluous voice that Tenn, even at his angriest, found soothing and calming, Rabb shared with Tenn a belief in the voices of actors, particularly women, and he designed plays with them in mind. “I heard my company,” Rabb told me. “I wanted a symphony on that stage. I did not want them to sound phony; I did not want them working their vocal organs simply to hear themselves. I wanted beauty of sound. I wanted strong, wellorchestrated voices to serve as the platters on which I could serve plays that we all loved.”

  Rosemary Harris had a voice that Rabb loved. Hers was a masticating voice, with something wonderful, perhaps a caramel or something equally buttery and warm, being worked in that pert little mouth. “Rosemary was probably what I wished I could have been in the theater,” Rabb told me. “As dysfunctional and as odd as that sounds, I think it is true. I looked at her and I thought: ‘If I were this pretty young actress with that marvelous voice, I would play the following roles,’ and I started listing them. I was very bold with her, as you can be when you are utterly sure of what you want with a person. If I had been in pursuit of Rosemary for her love and her body and her undying commitment to me and to the family of children we were bound to create, I would have been a mess. I would not have been able to talk to her. What I wanted instead was her theatrical body. Let me costume it, let me direct it in plays that will showcase what I already see in you. Our children will be plays and a company of actors. I could commit to that, and so could she. We might never have had the honesty to say to ourselves and to each other what we were doing when we married, but I think we both knew what we were getting into and what we were getting. We were establishing for ourselves careers and lives we had both dreamed about.”

  Rabb and Harris were married in 1960, and approximately one year later, while on a flight in a noisy airplane, Rabb had the epiphany of creating a repertory company. Over the din of the engines, Rabb announced his intention. “That’s nice,” Harris replied, and went back to her book. “Rosemary did not believe in demonstrations of support or affection. In fact, she is not capable of them, but her ‘That’s nice’ was the warmest thing she had ever said to me, and may remain the warmest.” Rabb and I both wondered how Tenn might have felt about the casting of Harris if the playwright had known of this interaction. A lack of enthusiasm was as lethal to Tenn as a lack of beauty or charm or talent.

  The APA began to make a name for itself quickly and Tenn began to imagine that they could do a good job with Camino Real. Rabb, however, had no interest in mounting that play, and instead hoped for a revival of either The Glass Menagerie or Streetcar, and, in 1973, he found a way to create his own version of the latter.

  “MY FIRST MEETING with Tennessee was wonderful,” Rabb remembered. “Funny and easy and full of talk about the look of the play. If he had any doubts about how I saw the play, he did not express them at that meeting.” Tenn was taken with the handsome Rabb, and he had learned from the scenic designer Rouben Ter-Arutunian, with whom he had once enj
oyed some “carnal abrasion,” that Rabb was an ardent lover, amply endowed. “Our first meeting at Lincoln Center,” Rabb told me, “after this charming meeting, and all of these phone calls about his play, and he walks up to me, in front of several people—my company, people involved with Lincoln Center—and he says, in a loud voice, ‘Rouben Ter-Arutunian tells me you’re hung!’ Well, it’s a line from a farce. I can laugh at it now, but at the time I was horrified. It demoralized me. I knew immediately that he did not take me seriously, that he didn’t take the entire enterprise seriously.”

  Harris read the part, early in rehearsals, with the confidence and control of someone who had played it before, who had already come to every conclusion as to who and what her character was, and this is exactly the way Tenn came to feel she behaved through the run of the play. “There was no element of surprise in her Blanche,” he remembered. “The vowels were perfect, the catches in the throat timed like a train schedule, but there was no heart, there was no peril. Blanche must always appear to be ready to break, as well as ready to reassemble and try a new tactic to survive. If I had to give an actress only one salient fact about Blanche, it is this: she is utterly unsure of herself and her surroundings. She has no faith in anything or anyone around her. Well, Rosemary Harris is the epitome of an actress utterly sure of her abilities and her charms and her control over her director—if that director is her ex-husband, Ellis Rabb—and I never felt for one moment that her Blanche was in grave danger, was at the edge, ready to topple. Her Blanche struck me as one who was basically fine, perhaps distraught, going through a phase. She acted as if she were a fat and happy cat who had just consumed a large platter of cream and was now lolling about, showing her extended belly, and waiting to have it patted.”

  Tenn took his doubts to Rabb, but the director was now so uncomfortable with the playwright that he tended to dismiss him. “I think I shut down a bit,” Rabb confessed. “I just poured my energy into the design of the play, into helping Rosemary feel stronger. You know, she was in knots as well. She felt Tennessee was judging her; she could tell that he wanted something from her that she wasn’t comfortable providing: friendship, company, constant uplift. She needed those things from me. She did not have them to give.”

  Rabb admits that there was an especially tight sense of control with the production. “In the past,” he told me, “I had let too many things come undone. I had relegated too many things to too many people. I was trying to be a good director and a good adult and take control of this play and become the director I hoped to be. And I was surrounded by people who admired and supported me, and Tennessee was unrealistic and out of control and demanding. Were we right? Were we sympathetic? I have no idea, but I still think we were right not to let him assume control of the production.”

  Tenn made calls to old friends Maureen Stapleton and Elia Kazan. “It was just a jug of wine, a lot of bread, and my fat ass,” Maureen quipped, “and I thought it was going to be a reunion of friends, but it turned into a real rant about Ellis Rabb and Rosemary Harris and these robots he had working for him. I tried to be what Tenn needed at that point: a sympathetic ear and shoulder to get plastered on. I realized that wasn’t all he needed. He needed to be redefined. He needed to be comforted. He needed to be reassured that his work would survive, that he would survive. The revival of this play—all of those revivals that year—were nice in their way, but it was the first realization for Tenn that he might be a playwright in the past tense, that he might not have a future.”

  Elia Kazan, the director Tenn trusted the most, had been sent every play he had written all throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s, with Tenn always hoping and asking for both his commitment to direct and his advice. Kazan always refused the first, but was generous with the second. “Look at those plays written in the years before that revival, and you’ll see where his mind was,” Kazan told me. “They really aren’t plays, but dialogues, diatribes. Someone is essentially saying, begging, ‘Look at me. Notice me. I am human and I am here,’ and a play, of sorts, is assembled around it, smuggled in and around a rant. The plays weren’t working, and I think Tenn felt terribly threatened.”

  Tenn was not relating well to women on the pages of his plays or to those with whom he was working. To executives at Lincoln Center, he suggested firing Harris and replacing her with Claire Bloom, an idea that was dismissed. “It was insane,” Rabb said. “Here we were working and moving toward an opening, and Tenn was upstairs trying to recast or close down the show.”

  Tenn called Jessica Tandy and asked for her advice. She recalled that she was busy and in the midst of several things, but nonetheless made the time for her friend, and they had a stressful dinner. “He wanted me to go and see Rosemary Harris and explain the part to her,” she told me. “A ludicrous idea, and one I rejected immediately. I told him that you cannot do that to an actress. I told him that he had to trust Rosemary to come to the Blanche that she could give him, and I believed that she would be fine. But Tenn wanted a big scene, a revision, a conversion that would turn the play around to his liking.”

  “He wanted a friend,” Maureen Stapleton said, “a lot of friends; a friend on every corner, but really a friend in his leading actress. He wanted her to look at him with adoration. He wanted her to walk around the city with him and tell him how the part he wrote had changed her life and her view of the theater. He wanted Rosemary Harris to give him the devotion he thought was going to Ellis Rabb. Well, welcome to the world, honey. The allocation of affection is not fair, and it doesn’t always run in our favor. It was not a great time to tell Tenn to grow up, but I think that’s what I did. Let’s just say there were not dark, sweet nights spent in my bed talking things out during that time. He was pissed at everyone.”

  “A writer has to matter,” Tenn told me, “and I no longer mattered. I even began to revisit the plays of Bill Inge.” Tenn had spoken at great length of Inge’s plays, had outlined the plots for me, had been enraged that they so closely resembled his own; but now he confessed that together, “Bill and I make an ideal playwright. He constructs beautifully. His intentions are good and sound. I can build the plays up, put some meat on the bones of the little fish he provides.” No one could convince Tenn that he was wasting his time and his energies. No one could tell him that one bad experience with one actress didn’t mean that his days of communication were over, that he would never know happiness in the theater again.

  Maria St. Just knew that the only thing that would help her friend was a new project, one that would compel him to work, to think about things, to look at himself. There was no play in the works, nothing that “needed me,” as he put it, so he committed himself to writing a memoir, the book of his life, full of memories of encounters that had worked, of women who had walked from the fog and found him, walked with him.

  “I didn’t go into it thinking I was writing a biography,” Tenn told me. “It was a summation, it was my statement of self. I wanted to share myself with others, but I also wanted to know who I was, who I had been, what I had done. I had lost track of how I had worked and believed and felt when things worked, when plays happened, when I had had the gift of friendship.” Tenn spent months on the book, showed pages to friends, rewrote passages, both to refine them and to bring forth from them what he most wanted: the writer who had once known how to do it, “had known how to share a human soul with other humans; who had known how to communicate.”

  Tenn thought of the process as an extensive confession, a harsh self-examination, a fearless inventory.

  He would do it again. He could do it again. I could help him.

  Eighteen

  “KATHARINE HEPBURN, Turtle Bay” had been written on several pieces of paper in Tenn’s possession, and he admitted that he liked to write it out, over and over, as a young girl might do with her name enhanced by the surname of her boyfriend. Tenn remembered receiving the first card from Hepburn, with those words written on the back flap of the envelope, and in his ignorance of that
Manhattan neighborhood, he imagined the ruddy, angular actress on the banks of a creek, reading, barking orders to the wilds of nature to do her bidding, to be wonderful all of a sudden for her benefit. This “willful, wonderful rapid stylist” had seductively circled Tenn for years before they ultimately worked together, on the film version of Suddenly, Last Summer, a property delivered “partially stillborn but still screaming” to screenwriter Gore Vidal and director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, a marriage, Tenn admitted, that was decidedly odd, but not quite as odd as the casting of Hepburn as Mrs. Venable, a woman who was, in Tenn’s words, “an authentic gem, a diamond of great size and worth, but deeply flawed, flawed perhaps beyond the human eye, but stuck in a diadem of dime-store junk.”

  Tenn recalled with mordant humor the description provided by Mankiewicz of the play he had agreed to direct: “Rich, crazy, overdressed bitch in New Orleans seeks to have a young woman lobotomized, because she has witnessed the bitch’s queer son involved in sodomy, and then cannibalized by local youths he has propositioned. The doctor craves the truth, a cure, and the funds this woman can provide.” Tenn laughed and remembered that he felt that the director (who was also a screenwriter Tenn admired) had adequately summed up his one-act play. Mankiewicz, for reasons not made clear to Tenn, did not choose to write the screenplay, and the assignment went to Vidal, whose work was “perfectly fine,” according to Tenn; but the film did not make him happy. “You have to consider the time,” Tenn told me, and he recounted the late 1950s for me, a time in his life when he began to understand that talents and bodies and loyalties wane and wither and disappear. The country in which he lived seemed perpetually in peril—by virtue of Soviet menace or disease or cultural atrophy; baby girls fell into wells and dead Irish girls spoke to the living—and while Tenn’s bank accounts were swelling to the point that he required regular maintenance of his funds, his emotional wealth, he recalled, was niggardly, “dribs and drabs and psychic IOUs.” Tenn’s relationship with Frank Merlo was unraveling, and he began to have difficulty with actors, producers, directors. Although Elia Kazan agreed, in 1959, to direct Sweet Bird of Youth, the experience was angry and left both men unhappy—with their work and with the state of their relationship. “There was a desiccation that was setting in with Tennessee,” Kazan told me. “Imagine a band of rubber, a strap of sorts, dry and extended. You know it will snap and crack and become useless, and that process had begun for Tennessee. The suspense was in waiting for his responses, and ultimately for the snapping, the unraveling of the man.”