Follies of God

by James Grissom

  His earliest acts of navigation all held the same motive: to calm down his home and his mother. “I wanted to make everything safe and calm for my mother,” he told me. “For me as well, of course, but I knew that I was with her, bound to her, made of her, belonging to her. I felt I had to be prepared for some imminent and immediate departure from those homes and those cities. I needed to know the streets and the means of escape. I needed to be funny and wise and strong and quick.”

  And yet the escape, when it was needed, was provided by his mother. Tenn had an early memory, from when he was very young, of his father striking him across the face, leaving him red and burning, and sending him to bed to cry and rage and listen. But the night air brought no sounds, and his interior map was out of sorts that night: he could not foresee how he might get out of the house and down the street and reach the train or the river. There were loud arguments between his mother and his father until he fell into a defensive sleep … only to be awakened by his frantic mother. “She pulled me close to her,” he remembered, “and I could smell her perfume and her hair spray and I could feel the softness of her cheek. My head rested perfectly on her shoulder, and we were heading out of the house.”

  Tenn could not remember where they were headed or where they wound up, but he could remember his mother’s quick steps and her perfume and her cheek and her manic wobble down the sidewalk and her words, repeated over and over like a prayer in his ear: “You’re safe, baby. You’re safe, baby.” A lie, surely—there was no safety in that house or on those streets or in the arms of that woman—but that was the story and that was a means to be calmed and they were on the move.

  “We were navigating,” he told me, “but it was precarious. I loved her and I knew she was trying to protect me, to get me away from anything that might harm me, but I wanted, and I needed, a stable woman, a stable person.” Tenn had searched for years for that person, had come close to finding such a person, and he believed that it might be Katharine Hepburn. “So I brought all of this baggage, all of this drama, all of this pain right to her,” he told me, “and I asked her to help me sort it out, to make some sense of it. It was ludicrous, but it was what I needed and wanted, and it brought me some of the same comfort as that run in the night with my mother.”

  Katharine Hepburn cried easily—and strenuously. When I had finished reading her these notes, she was waving her hands across her face, embarrassed. She asked me to stop and to give her some time. “I had no idea,” she told me, quietly. “I wish I had known that he wanted me to help him. I wish I could have.”

  In a matter of minutes, Hepburn had concluded our first visit, with a promise for another, at which time she would tell me her side of the events concerning her and Tennessee Williams. I was aware that I was being rushed out of her home.

  Several days later I received a letter from Hepburn in which she wrote: “Too bad Tennessee never told me that—I thought he was—is and always will be remarkable—”

  I assumed that the letter might be the end of our relationship, but two days later, I received a call from her.

  She had thought a great deal about this project of mine, and she had some things to say.

  I noticed that Katharine Hepburn was at her freest when a dessert was served and consumed: a large bowl of ice cream delighted and released her, and she barely noticed or spoke to the woman who brought the trays into the room; she waved her away peremptorily and offered me a bowl. I noted that the bowls were like those at Brennan’s in New Orleans, one of the restaurants to which Tenn and I had gone one day, where the bowls of bread pudding were the size of a German shepherd’s head.

  Katharine Hepburn was easily moved—a fact she tried very hard to hide. After my first visit to her home, when she cried upon hearing how Tennessee felt about her, she sent me this note. (illustration credit 18.2)

  “I would like that restaurant,” Hepburn said, snorting and enjoying the ice cream. I resented the eating times with Hepburn because I felt that we weren’t talking, but it was during these times that she shared her sharpest opinions of some of the people Tenn had admired.

  “I had no idea that Tennessee was so enamored of Ruth Chatterton,” she told me one evening. “She was a good actress, very stylish, but there was something about her that led me to believe she would just disappear.”

  “From?”

  “From the stage, from the screen, from memory,” Hepburn replied. “She liked to be married, I think. She liked clothes and travel, and she started to write. I think she wanted a type of life that wasn’t the type of life an actress needs to live, has to live.”

  I asked her what type of life that would be.

  “Look,” she said, “nothing happens by accident or fate or luck. Everything happens by design, and most of those women on your list—on Tennessee’s list—made very conscious decisions about their lives and about their actions in their careers to become good and to become some sort of inspiration to people. It is a struggle—a perpetual struggle—to do anything worthwhile, to earn anything from what you do. Nothing happens. Effort is made and it is rewarded. No gift falls upon anyone. It’s dug out of someone, worked on, tried out, reworked, toned. It takes a lot of strength and determination to be ready to keep doing good work. This is what I remember Tennessee writing about me, right?”

  I told her that Tenn had envied her upbringing, and had often dreamed of having the New England childhood she must have had. Some of the photos Tenn had clipped, and some of the homes he imagined moving about and living in, had been in Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont—names that seemed to him exotic, superior.

  “Doesn’t everyone feel that way?” Hepburn replied. “I loved my family and my childhood, and I still love New England, but I sometimes wonder how things might have been—what I might have become—if I’d been born in some exotic place like New Orleans, or a flat, dry place like Texas or Oklahoma. I would have been odd and determined wherever I had happened to live.”

  “No dreams when you were growing up?” I asked.

  “Well, what the hell does that mean?” she retorted. “Do you mean while sleeping? Or looking up in the sky? No, I’m not much of a dreamer.”

  “No cutting of pictures or journal keeping?”

  “God, no,” she shot back. “I don’t believe in there being too much time between the realization of what you want to do and doing it. Tennessee talks of threads, tying us to people and to things. Short threads are best, I think. You think it and you do it. You dream it and you do it. You love someone, you keep them close.” Hepburn leaned forward, placing both hands on her knees, and shot me a stern look. “I’m so tired of the term ‘victim,’ ” she said. “Everybody’s a victim. I’m not talking about the tragedies of the world, in which people truly are victimized: I’m talking about everyday activities in which people enjoy crying out about their status as a victim. Everybody has been abused or betrayed or deliberately set out on a course of failure. This is such bullshit, I don’t even know what to say. Our failures emanate from within us; my failures are my own damned fault. I can’t look at a man or a woman or a studio or the mores of a certain time and say, ‘Well, I was a victim of that person or that time.’ No, I might have allowed them to lead me to believe that I was unsuitable or unattractive or untalented. And I never let them, so I was never a victim. And this is not because I’m so smart—anyone can adopt this philosophy and do quite well in life. Refuse to be a victim. Learn from the unfortunate incident—failed audition, being fired, losing at love, being born in the wrong place or at the wrong time—and do something about it, and then succeed at the next go-round. I can’t even turn on the television or look at a newsstand now without seeing the latest victim. I find people horribly boring, I must say. I think they must enjoy their acute ability to enjoy and promote their failure.”

  Her conversations with me, slightly argumentative and always pushing away too much curiosity, generally continued in this way; but on that one evening, sated by ice cream, I again brought up
the meeting between Tenn and Hepburn, when he felt so tired and heavy and wanted her advice on how to live and how to come to grips with one’s history.

  “I wanted Tenn—I wanted everybody—to simplify things and just get on with their work, do what they were meant to do. I needed to understand that part and that director and those other actors, and Tennessee needed to write and sort out his life. In the notes Tennessee gave you, you mention the single bar of soap. Well, that came from my father, who taught me well. You keep asking questions and posing situations—just as Tennessee did—and I keep thinking of my father: A man whose sink had on it one big bar of durable, good soap. And that bar of soap was used for cleaning, shaving, and brushing his teeth. It worked fine; it was fast; it was economical. He could then get on with his day. I think we clutter our minds and our lives in a way people would have liked for my father to clutter his toilet. There is too much clutter and too much thinking and too much devising. I think you need to be true to your work and your friends—these should be small circles. People who have too many friends tend to have too few ideas, I find, and they cover up their disappointment with parties and chatter and movement. Focus on working well and being there for you, your work, and your friends. One bar of soap. Taught me a lot.”

  A pause.

  “Tennessee worried too much,” she continued, “and he felt that the answer to his problem was somewhere outside of himself, outside of his friends. He loved women, and that is wise, but we could only do so much. He wanted an example, but he never realized that he was an example to me—so brilliant and sharp and funny. I’m not any of those things. I’d like to be. I pretend to be. He was so extraordinary by birth and by effort, but he was a victim, or chose to see himself as one. He foolishly believed that I had escaped any sort of doubt in my life, and that my flawless past, as he saw it, could rub off on him.

  “You sit down and you begin to think about your past and all that you’ve done with it,” Hepburn admitted, “and you are going deep and close to the experiences, but to see it properly, you need a greater perspective, so you pull away and you take your life in sections. You think of yourself in your twenties. Later you think of yourself in terms of relationships, and you think ‘the Cukor years’ or the ‘Spencer Tracy years’ or ‘the MGM years.’ From that great distance, looking at yourself moving among all those other people and doing whatever you were doing, you find that it has a line—a time line—but to understand it, to fully understand it, you need to move in closer, and so you think—I had to think—about particular experiences or events or emotions. I had to chop it up, or edit it. No one wanted the entire time line, least of all me.

  “You know,” she continued, “I think what I wanted to tell you—what I’ve been meaning to tell you—and probably what I told Tennessee all those years ago—is that it’s perfectly acceptable to take that long view and study your life and your actions, but I think it’s a bit foolish to study it too much. Tennessee used the term ‘navigation’ to describe it for you, and one doesn’t move too much or too far if you spend a lot of time analyzing everything you see along the way. You see some things and you use them or you don’t, you like them or you don’t, but the point, I think, is to get where you’re going, and to spend the time getting there preparing for what you’ll find, for what you’ll need to do. Tennessee was so caught up in finding the meaning of things that I think he stopped moving, he stopped advancing, to use the term he kept talking about.

  “There really isn’t as much mystery to the world and the people in it,” she continued. She smiled and she got up and began walking around the room. I thought the interview might be over, but she was only stretching her legs, after which she called down the stairs for a drink. She asked if I wanted one, but I declined. “Smart move, I guess,” she quipped.

  Katharine Hepburn, on the set of Suddenly, Last Summer, 1959. Tennessee sought her out for advice and to use as an example of living well and right, but she was not eager to be a teacher to him. “So talented and so needy,” she said. “I could never understand why he didn’t see how much he was loved.” (illustration credit 18.3)

  She sat back down and continued.

  “Whatever is complicated about people, in my opinion, is entirely self-created,” she said. “Life is often difficult, it certainly calls for some crafty navigation, but I don’t find it at all mysterious or needing support systems or myths to get through it. Life is work, so you do your work and you do it well. This will require study and hard work and attention and stamina. That is all. Life is friendship, so you care for your friends and look after them and keep in touch. Some of them fall away; you find you have nothing in common with them any longer. Some of them die. You miss them and you remember them. That is all. I don’t know why Tennessee needed to know what the plan was. I never looked for a plan, I can assure you. I looked for a way: a way to act, to do what I wanted, to live as I pleased. I didn’t make lists or scatter notes about. I just did it.

  “I also think that Tennessee thought his talent would save him. Well, it’s not enough to be talented. There’s a lot of talent out there, but it’s owned by lazy, stupid, or essentially boring people. You can’t just be talented: You have to be terribly smart and energetic and ruthless. You also have to become necessary to people, by working hard and well and bringing more than your bones and your skin to the project. Don’t just show up. Transform the work, yourself, and everybody around you. Be needed. Be interesting. Be something no one else can be—and consistently.”

  She became a bit more animated as she continued. “Perhaps it is different for a writer. I’d have to admit that I have no concept of how they gather their ideas and get them into a script. I don’t, but I was aggravated—I’m still aggravated, as you can see—that Tennessee was so caught up in the meaning of things, the getting through things, the remembering of all the things, big and small, that had happened to him and to those he liked and cared about.”

  I realized that the interview was over, but she merely stared at me, and I began to put my papers together, but she stopped me and asked me to read a particular portion of Tenn’s notes that I had not sent to her, but which had been described to her by Marian Seldes. The notes dealt with Tenn’s devotion to and need for women in his life, which he found baffling. “Why did he find it baffling?” Hepburn asked. I read her the notes.

  So here we are—here I am—perpetually seeking the amatory affections and affirmations of men, while my heart, the very core of my soul, responds to, needs, reaches out for female company, friendship, communion. You know, I have never been betrayed by a woman. I can see now that my mother lied to protect both of us. Sins of creativity and escape, I suppose. Her anger was something she believed might construct a cocoon that could protect both of us. But betrayal? Never.

  Now the men in my life—the men in the lives of all inverted men—will betray you and look away if your jacket is the wrong shade in the wrong material. They’ll cast you aside if a single curd of fat graces your body, a wrinkle creases the fabric from which they hope to make a shawl of prayer and possession.

  Perhaps because I want the best from women—soul and love and warmth and friendship and loyalty—it is what I receive. The life and desirability of the physical attributes are placed on our bodies with clocks ticking and gravity pulling with a mighty vengeance. But the heart and the soul—if surrounded by women—grow, swell, reach out perpetually for surcease and sharing.

  A desirable man is the one who subsumes what he has been given by women, witnessed of women.

  And here I am—here we are—looking at the legs and the smiles of those who don’t care what we think or write or can do with a bundle of words and a couple of women. And when they reject and hurt us, we run back to the circle of women who surround us, prop us up, lead us back to the pale judgment, the blank page, the surface to which we apply our souls.

  This is called irony, honey. Look into it.

  Hepburn laughed as I finished the notes, raised her eyebrows, and
quipped that “a lot of that is true,” but then she was off on another thought. “I refuse to believe that love or affection can be defined,” she said, “because we may feel and think differently in a year or two or after a bad experience next Thursday. And then someone walks into your life and you feel great affection for them. How do you define that? Why should you? Just feel it! Just enjoy it! Just express it! But people want to define it; they want to define everything. Tennessee had to have everything mapped out, understood. If I had known that about him—if he had brought those concerns in those notes to me—I would have told him that the plan belongs to him; the plan is waiting for your hand to write it and your heart to believe it. Our lives cannot be dictated by the feelings of others, no matter how painful those feelings may be, or how much harm they may inflict upon us. I can’t understand why Tennessee—why so many people—don’t have the faith in themselves or what they do or what they believe. Why are they always weakened by others?

  “I will respect you till the day you die if you believe in things and stand up for them, but if you move into my space and try to tell me how I should feel, how I should love, how I should believe, well, I’ll cut you down like lumber. And I wish I could have told Tennessee Williams to just cut down those people—and those thoughts—that kept him so frozen, so heavy, so afraid.”

  Hepburn walked me out of the house and strongly patted my shoulder. She thanked me for coming, for including her in the book, and asked that I stay in touch. But she was clearly done with the entire project.