Unable to sleep without assistance, Tenn began to heavily use sleeping pills, prescribed for him by a small retinue of doctors or given to him by friends, among them Kim Stanley and Maureen Stapleton, both of whom remembered—and regretted—their steady supply to their friend. In the mornings, up early to swim and to brew coffee and to face the task of writing, Tenn found himself logy and out of sorts, so he began to use amphetamines on a regular basis, whereas in the past they had been, as he put it, “dangerous candy, a treat to spark things up, to keep the thread going.”
Tenn felt bloated and heavy and slow, as if his blood had turned to glue, and he found that the amphetamines, “the glorious rush,” only gave him an hour or two of lightness and swiftness, after which he would begin again to fall to the earth, to drift downward. His eyes and nose and mouth were painfully dry, and the habit of flicking his tongue across and through his lips, like a manic lizard, began at this time.
“I had a fantasy at that time,” he told me, “of being submerged in a cool liquid and calming my entire head down. Of having my blood replaced. Of being replenished.” Tenn felt similarly in our time together, complaining of his swollen feet and burning ankles and heels, his dry eyes and mouth, the perpetual weight, “the cross of addiction,” that bore down upon him. “I dwell upon my physical limitations at that time,” he told me, “so that you will understand why I was so eager to spend time with Katharine Hepburn. I believed that somehow she would inspire and invigorate me as the pills occasionally could.” Tenn subjected himself, as he put it, to a brutally clammy climate in London and a set on which he was not particularly welcome or needed to bask in something he hoped Hepburn might provide.
“I cannot be trusted to give you an adequate summation of that time,” Tenn told me. “I would be interested in knowing how Kate felt about it. I would be curious to hear what her impressions might have been.”
I did not think that Katharine Hepburn would respond to my letters, and if she did, I did not think that she would agree to see me. My earliest knowledge of her was that she was diabolically private, secretive, not interested in discussing things or looking back, but I was determined to honor Tenn’s directions, and so I set about finding her. My old, red-clad copy of Who’s Who in America listed 201 Bloomfield Avenue in Hartford, Connecticut, as her address, but Marian Seldes assured me that it was best to write to her at the Turtle Bay apartment; she also promised to tell Hepburn about me and my plans.
I had included my telephone number in my letter, and less than a week after I had sent it, I received a phone call from her. And there she was on the line. Surprised. Delighted. Exasperated. She could not imagine, could not understand at all what Tennessee might have seen in her, could have learned from her. The phone call appeared to be taking on the shape of so many calls from actresses, in which they expressed their gratitude and their love of Tennessee, but then begged off discussing him or pursuing anything at all. Hepburn, however, set about to ascertain what I might want, how I might obtain it, when I might be free to pursue what she called “this fascinating, foolish task ahead of you.”
What, I asked her, was foolish about the task?
“Well,” she said, laughing, “I think it’s pretty damn foolish to come to me, for instance, to try and understand Tennessee Williams. To go to any actress and to try to decide what, if anything, matters, but …” Her sentence wandered off.
“Listen,” she said. “Do you know my literary agent?” I told her I didn’t.
“Oh, well, never mind,” at which point she looked through notes or books or calendars and gave me a date for coming to see her—at the Turtle Bay apartment that Tenn had thought about so many times. I told her about his image of the home he thought she might live in.
“Oh, well,” she replied, “you’re going to be quite disappointed. No lakes or ponds or wildlife here, but I’ll show you where he sat, and I’ll try to make some sense out of what it is you’re doing.”
She told me she had finished writing another book, her autobiography.
“It’s fascinating,” she said, “and maddening.”
I was about to reply, but she had hung up.
I had been told that it was in my best interests to arrive punctually at Hepburn’s home. Both Marian Seldes and her husband, Garson Kanin, who, with his first wife and writing partner, Ruth Gordon, had created three of the Tracy-Hepburn films, told me to arrive “prepared,” and I wasn’t sure what they meant. They did not clarify the term too well; they only reiterated that one should be prepared and at one’s best when in the company of Katharine Hepburn.
I had mailed to Hepburn some of Tenn’s comments about her, but she specifically asked me to bring them for our visit, and I had copies with me. On the advice of Jessica Tandy, I arrived perfectly clean, with no scent of anything—perfume, city filth, food—on my person. “I have always found her to be a clean-slate sort of person,” Tandy told me. “Clean, precise, detailed.” Ellis Rabb had told me that she had positioned above her dressing-room mirror a quote from Nabokov, “Caress the detail, the divine detail,” so I was rested and clear and ready to offer details or to be detailed.
I arrived at the house at the precise time that had been requested, and after one ring of the doorbell, the door swiftly flew open and Katharine Hepburn stood there, colorful and alert.
“I was right here when you rang!” she exclaimed. “Perfect! A good start. Now wait a minute.” She was carrying a large shopping bag full of papers, and I had clearly interrupted the journey she had planned for them. She looked about a bit and then threw them into the dining room and made a gesture toward the bag as if to say “Stay there!” She then turned to me and asked if I needed or wanted anything. A drink? Something to eat? A tour? A trip to the bathroom? I told her I needed nothing.
“Perfect! Let’s get right on to this,” and I followed her up a narrow staircase to a bright, white-walled room, comfortable, with the windows open to a crisp breeze, even though it was late in June. “You! Sit there! Tennessee sat there once. Not in that chair, but in that space.” I sat in a chair directly across from her and she looked at me strongly. She paused for a moment and then said, “Now who all is involved in this project you’ve begun?”
Most actresses wish to know the names of the members of the company she is keeping, and Hepburn was avaricious in her desire to know to whom I had spoken, what they were like, and what their response had been to Tenn’s comments and to my questions. She was fearless in offering her opinions of the people on my list, and her exclaiming “Oh, well!” when a name was mentioned meant that I should watch myself. Her greatest generosity was in recognizing and praising the talent of others, and she offered concise and sharp summations of each and every person.
Jessica Tandy? “Oh, she’s marvelous. Seemingly weak but granite and grace fused together.” Maureen Stapleton? “Wonderful actress; funny; a mess.” Kim Stanley? “Tragic. A great talent and a willful, public suicide.” Barbara Baxley? “Trouble. Troubled within and looking to make trouble around her. To make her feel comfortable, at home, I suppose.” Edward Albee? “Closed. Doors shut. Brilliant but buried somewhere I can’t reach.” Marian Seldes? “Well, I may change my opinion of her, given that she brought you to me, but I adore her. Disciplined and devoted. Slavish.” Geraldine Page? “The type of actress I would have liked to have been; the sort of person I tend to avoid.” Helen Hayes? “Well, what can you say about Helen Hayes? She’s no longer one of us, is she? She’s like the color blue or ore or Benjamin Moore paint. She exists, she is used, she serves a purpose. What is there to discuss?” Stella Adler? “Beyond me. Brilliant. Wise. Regal. I wish she would act more and pontificate less.”
On the Venice set of David Lean’s Summertime (1955). “I wish I could move through life with her ease,” Tennessee told me. (illustration credit 18.1)
Hepburn was delighted to learn that I did not use tape recorders, and she wanted to know why I did not. I told her that the subject and I invariably became obsessed with
the machine, stared at it, checked on it, and our conversation grew slack in detail because we believed, and hoped, that it was all being recorded on tape. I told her about the tape literally coming unspooled in the apartment of Mildred Natwick, the brown, snakelike material oozing out of the machine and onto Natwick’s coffee table.
“Mildred Natwick! My God, you spoke to Mildred Natwick? What on earth did she have to say?”
I told Hepburn that it would be difficult to condense all that Natwick had told me, at which point she interrupted to demand that I tell her the best thing Natwick had told me. I told Hepburn that Natwick refused to be limited by lack or despair or troubles of any kind, and her reaction to anything was to say, boldly and cheerfully, “Let’s make as little of this as quickly as possible.”
“Perfect! I love that. I love Mildred Natwick, and she’s quite right. Now … what did Tennessee tell you about me?”
I drew out my papers. Hepburn, in white pants and a crisp chambray shirt, had her leg up on a table and her left hand on her chin. During my reading to her, she frequently adjusted lamps, moved books on a table, readjusted pencils in a mug, but she made a point of keeping her gaze on me at almost every second. She did not interrupt my reading of Tenn’s version of this person he idolized called Katharine Hepburn, but she often emitted a loud, sharp snort, a humorous editorial comment, and whenever I looked at her, she would motion for me to continue. I read it to her as she commanded: clearly, loudly, and exactly as I had written it down and remembered it.
Katharine Hepburn: Goethe in Gingham.
She cannot enter a room quietly or make a statement that doesn’t have within it a tiny but lethal explosion of truth. A shock effect, of course, but true nonetheless, worthy of attention, yes, but worthier still of one’s thought. Not really all that tall, but she appears to be so, through posture and both a sense of entitlement and of purpose—she is always moving toward a goal, an end, an explanation, an end to some nonsense. Work achieved; a sense of satisfaction; beginning again. This is her Holy Trinity, I think, while mine was a bit more exotic, darker, confused, overdone. Analysis to her was not conducted in sessions with doctors or experiments with pills and injections or through prayer to some supernal overseer, but through work. Whatever she wanted to find—and whatever she ultimately did find—came through work, through the seeking. Knowledge is nestled deep within the marble that is life, and she relentlessly hammers away at it, chipping away all that is superfluous and silly until she can see what she needs, admires it, uses it, cares for it. Like the axiom attributed to Goethe, Kate understands the magic and the power that begins and survives through boldness. For her there is nothing holier than the sacrificial act of making that leap toward the creation of something: a part in a play or a film; the reading of a book important to her; the creation of a meal; the conquering of a task. I toil in a church festooned with the images and the intentions of saints, their progressions noted and offered to us as examples of how to accept and apply all that has been given to us. Exemplification, my mother always told me, is what we are here for. I cannot find a reason to make my own leaps in the lives of Mary or Veronica or Bridget or any of the Theresas, but I can look upon this vivid woman, scornful of limits and blockage, and move toward the edge of whatever I need to do, to achieve, to exemplify.
On an index card Tenn had written: “Katharine Hepburn has one goal. One bar of soap for face, hair, teeth, body. A bar of soap big and white, like the pale judgment. Pressed against her body to get it going in the morning. The pale judgment awaits me in the morning, looking for me to press myself against it. To come clean.”
In conversation with me: “I went to Kate in a form of supplication. I was unhappy and I didn’t feel well, and I was divorced from this play of mine, which was now the film of other men, the property of other men, and I had my check from the film people, and I had my curiosity piqued at being on the set with such beautiful and vibrant people, but I was in terrible pain. Everything hurt, and things were beginning to be blurred for me. I did not have that clear intention that Kate always had, and I went to her, foolish and fulsome, to learn from her, to be guided by her, and she was a busy and committed actress. She had no time for my fears and my complaints, but she received me. She received me in the truest sense of that word. There was nothing holy or reverent about our time together; there was great laughter and a number of arguments. There were no secrets or covenants. But what I came away with I could have used effectively and persistently and been a better writer and a better friend and a better person—if I had had the courage and the discipline. That,” he told me, no less than three times, “she gave me: The knowledge that I, and I alone, had to be and should be responsible for myself. For my talent and for my ankles and my dry mouth and blistered lips and itchy eyes. For my bad back and my bad intentions and my maddening ability to see the poison in the fruit and the sniper in the trees. To be, at all times, an adult.”
For most of his life, Tenn had been surrounded by—had chosen to be surrounded by—women of a volatile nature, skittish, manic, tuned at times to a frequency no one else could hear or decipher. These were women with whom he felt comfortable, finding solace in their inability to function any better than he did, their tendency to foster appetites similar to his, to veer toward the illegal and the immobilizing. “You can talk deep into the night with a crazy woman,” Tenn confided to me, “but you can’t get the groceries with one, or meet a deadline, or get the lights turned back on, or take yourself to the doctor on time, or meet with someone who might produce or publish your work. They work against the grain of productivity and function. They howl at a moon of entertainment, endless and garish, but they are never a foundation upon which one can operate or from which one can propel oneself toward work or action.”
The initial and predominant model of such a woman was, of course, his mother, a frantic fabulist, industrious with invention and denial, but never boring, whether she was creating stories about her ancestors or devising threats in the sounds of the wind or the whispers of Negroes on the streets of St. Louis. Edwina not only believed that the fruit was poisoned, but she had an idea who might have planted the cyanide or the curare within the flesh, and the snipers were on the roofs and in the bushes and they were placed there to prevent her from claiming the truth of things, which only she knew and had the presence of mind to share. “I grew up in a psychic circus,” Tenn told me, with more wonder than anger or regret. “There was confetti in the air and it was madness, ideas floating in the wind of my mother’s invention and madness, like my leaves of invention and illness. There was shit in the sawdust of that circus, but it was all self-produced and allowed to remain there. It was a dirty house, not to appearances, of course: my mother would have nothing but a neat and proper home. It was dirty in spirit, cluttered. Not evil; just terribly unfocused and misguided.”
This was what Tenn believed all women must be, and he learned to navigate the world with his mother as his guide. Charm, guile, lies, hysteria. When I asked Tenn what his mother had given to him that had served him well, he had replied with those four words, qualities and attributes from which had sprung the other gift she had bestowed upon him: his ability to tell stories, to construct four walls around any situation and to get a woman talking and moving and aiming for release.
Talent, he told me, does not originate purely: it derives from something else, as a pearl or coal does, as pain must. Talent is the result of some friction, consistent and substantial, and the defense a person devises against it becomes a painting or a poem or a play. Or a tantrum. “The line between art and bad behavior is terribly fine,” he told me. “Something that is of some use to others can arise, or simply a means of getting attention or a particular reaction. You need to know how to discern the difference in yourself and others.”
Tenn’s earliest memories of his own navigation involved his bed in various homes. The bed in which he was sick and was comforted by his mother, who brought him ginger ale and soup and magazines he was a
llowed to cut apart, finding images that appealed to him, settings into which he would have loved to disappear and belong. A bed to which his mother would come and read to him, acting out parts and editorializing. The bed in which he would lie at night, hugging his radio and listening to the stories of others, which he could imagine being a part of, or improving. The bed in which he lay, deprived of his radio by his angry father, and listening to the sounds of the neighbors—arguments, laughter, music from down the street, a train’s whistle, a boat’s horn, a dog barking, a baby crying. Trying to determine how far or near they might be, and what might be going on around them, creating a story. Imagining himself walking one block, two blocks, one mile, four miles to get to the dog or the baby or the river. Remembering the houses he might find on the way, the trees, the scent of the flowers at particular intersections.
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