Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (3 page)

Williams found himself in a full-court press of production concerns. Dowling condescended to him—he called him “laddie”—and badgered him for rewrites. “Mr. Dowling . . . is trying (in vain) to get the author to write more (God knows he talks forever more!) in his part,” Taylor wrote to her son. “Tennessee is Southern, thirty [
sic
], and very obstinate when they call him ‘an ungrateful little squirt.’ ” (Williams’s response to Dowling had been to drawl, “I can’t find the tranquility in Chicago to write.”)

Singer, fearing economic catastrophe and refusing even to pay twenty-five dollars for a new dress for Laura, demanded a happy ending. At one crucial production meeting, Singer said he wanted Laura and the Gentleman Caller—Tom’s workmate whom Tom is pressured to invite to dinner as a potential suitor for his sister—to get together at the finale. Williams was being steamrolled. Knowing the limitations of his shy, awkward personality, Margo Jones put her foot down. “Tennessee, don’t change that ending,” she said, slamming her fist into her palm. Part of Jones’s job description was to run interference for Williams; she then leveled her husky voice at the producer: “Mr. Singer, if you make Tennessee change the play the way you want it, so help me I’ll go around to every critic in town and tell them about the kind of wire-pulling that’s going on here.” Williams’s ending stayed.

The opening night performance of
The Glass Menagerie
in Chicago was on the snowy day after Christmas in 1944. “It was a strange night,” Dowling said. “There was no applause for anybody, no applause on entrances, nothing. It was bitter cold. The audience, it seemed to me in the first part of it, were all huddled like people trying to get close to each other to try to keep warm.” Although subsequent ads for the play dubbed it “the greatest play in fifty years,” the first-night audience, according to Audrey Wood, “was respectful but hardly ecstatic. The reviews were good, especially that of Claudia Cassidy, the drama critic of the Chicago
Tribune
. She and Ashton Stevens, another respected critic took it upon themselves to campaign for the survival of ‘The Glass Menagerie,’ ” Wood recalled. However, there were no advance ticket sales and the box-office takings for the first fortnight were a meager $11,530. “For eight weeks, we starved. We were losing four and five thousand a week,” Dowling recalled. For a production capitalized at $75,000, the writing was on the fourth wall. For most of its ten-week run,
The Glass Menagerie
was on the verge of closing.

The play’s commercial future may have been in doubt, but the amperage of Laurette Taylor’s star never was. The reviews heaped lavish praise on her, with the
Chicago Tribune
even comparing her to the legendary Eleanora Duse. Show-biz cognoscenti began converging on Illinois to see what the excitement was about—among them, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Raymond Massey, Maxwell Anderson, Luther Adler, Gregory Peck, and Ruth Gordon. (After seeing the play twice, Gordon sent Taylor three-dozen roses with a poem that read, “When Miss Taylor plays in ‘The Menagerie of Glass’ / She makes all other actresses seem a pain in the ass.”)

Despite all the ballyhoo, only at the last minute did the production find a Broadway theater. By that time, Williams was in the doghouse. After he’d published a snippy letter to the editor in the
Chicago
Herald-American
lamenting “the distortions that have taken place since businessmen and gamblers discovered that theater could be made part of their empire,” Dowling and Singer, furious, struck his name from all pre-Broadway publicity. “Pandemonium back-stage!” Williams wrote to James Laughlin, with less than three weeks to go before Broadway. “Intrigues, counter-intrigues, rages, smashed door-panes—quelle menagerie!” He added: “Things are so tense all the time you never know when the whole company will just blow up and vanish! Actors are just not believable—so fantastic! Especially the good ones.”

The Glass Menagerie
opened on Broadway on the warmest March 31 on record. “We arrived in New York a week before our opening. I rehearsed them all week because I was worried about Miss Taylor. The minute she found out in Chicago that the odds were against us in getting a theater in New York and we might close there, she began to sneak a little martini or two. Nothing I couldn’t handle, but I was frightened stiff.” Even on opening night, Dowling had rehearsed the company until five in the afternoon, then called the cast back onstage at seven for “a quick run-through.” “It seemed incredible to us that by curtain time Laurette would have the strength left to give a performance,” Tony Ross, who played the Gentleman Caller, said. “All the company were on me, but I knew very well what I was up to,” Dowling said.

The day was muggy; the trees in Central Park had begun to bud. Williams, accompanied by Donald Windham, spent the afternoon rummaging through junk shops on Second and Third Avenue in search of a lampshade for the show’s second act. He dropped by a bookstore in Penn Station to tell his friend, the actor-turned-playwright Horton Foote, about the opening. Foote, who was eight years younger than Williams, thought of him as “artistically my big brother.” Both men were young playwrights trying to forge a new, emotionally truthful American theater. Foote, who had read early versions of the play, had received permission to stage the Gentleman Caller scene at his Neighborhood Playhouse acting class. He was keen to be at opening night. Williams explained that he had ceded to his agent all but two tickets, with which he was taking Windham. He told Foote that he’d try to slip him in.

At about five-thirty, as Dowling and his wife, Ray, reached their hotel near the theater to change clothes and get some dinner, there was, as Dowling recalled it, “a torrential downpour.” “Oh, it was frightful,” he said. “And this was our opening night. Of course it didn’t mean anything so far as tickets were concerned, but it meant a whole lot in performance, because when you bring in an audience soaking, wringing wet from head to foot, with all this sort of stuff, it’s an uncomfortable audience. Well, it was just an ominous kind of thing to happen at that particular time.” When they came out on the street again, at quarter to seven, the rain had stopped. “The most beautiful rainbow that I’ve ever seen in my life was right across the sky encompassing the whole Playhouse Theatre, the sign, the sidewalk, everything,” Dowling said. “It was almost like daylight. It was so gorgeous—this beautiful rainbow. And she and I stood and looked up at it. We were two very, very happy people.” They strolled to the theater, “thanking all of the gods that we ever heard about, and just feeling so reassured.”

As the Dowlings turned into the alley leading to the Playhouse’s stage door, they saw Laurette Taylor. She was slumped on the steps, with the rain dripping from the roof onto her. She was drunk and “soaking, wringing wet, like a cat that’s been locked out all night,” Dowling said. They got her to her feet. “Hel-lo, Ray. Hel-lo, Eddie. It’s the rain. Nothing wrong with me. Just the rain,” she said. Curtain time was ninety minutes away. Dowling and his wife walked Taylor around, feeding her black coffee and stewed tomatoes from a can. Finally, an hour later, they got her into her dressing room, where she took a shower. “We could hear the buzzing of a great crowd outside,” Dowling recalled. The beaming producers were backstage full of news of the celebrities in attendance. “I said nothing to anybody about her,” Dowling recalled.

Fifteen minutes before curtain, Williams, with Horton Foote in tow, found Dowling smoking a cigarette in the alley. “Eddie, can you get him a seat for tonight?” Williams asked.

“Laddie, it’s all sold out,” Dowling said, turning to Foote. “Would you mind standing?”

“No, sir.”

Dowling disappeared inside the stage door for a few minutes.

Because of Foote’s warmth and bushy-tailed ingenuousness, Williams referred to him behind his back as “a pineapple ice cream soda”; however, the same earnest qualities had kept Foote in Williams’s mind as possible casting for either the Gentleman Caller or Tom.

Dowling pushed open the stage door. “Tennessee, tell them in front to let him in. He’s to stand,” Dowling said.

“Thank you, sir,” Foote said.

“Let’s hurry,” Williams said to Foote. They bustled off down the alley to the front of house.

Inside, as Williams rushed to his seat, Margo Jones worked the aisles, glad-handing friends. “Darlin’, we gonna change the whole theater I’m tellin’ you, we gonna do it. Honey, we gonna bring you along with us,” she gushed to Foote just before the lights dimmed.

Arguing with Dowling outside Taylor’s apartment after her inept first reading, Williams had invoked his first monumental Broadway-bound failure,
Battle of Angels
, a theatrical dream that had gone up in smoke. “Oh, my God, our fate will be worse with this thing in Chicago than ‘Battle of Angels’ in Boston,” he said.

Williams had begun writing
Battle of Angels
in late 1939, almost a year after the day, December 26, 1938, that he, a recent graduate from the University of Iowa drama school, had mailed a batch of plays from his grandparents’ house in Memphis to a Group Theatre competition and set off for New Orleans to claim his literary and sexual destiny. Williams wagered everything on his imagination. “Know Your Opportunity—Seize It” was the family motto, and Williams did just that. In an attempt to disguise the three years that he’d shaved off his age to meet the competition requirement, Tom Williams had signed himself “Tennessee” for the first time. In one of the scripts he submitted—
Not About Nightingales
—the hero, about to attempt a prison escape at the finale, announces, “Now is the time for unexpected things, for miracles, for wild adventures like in the storybooks! . . . Almost a chance! I’ve heard of people winning on a long shot.” Williams was taking a similar leap of faith, and the bet paid off. The judges at the Group Theatre, the most innovative and influential theater company of the thirties, had awarded him one hundred dollars. They had also steered him to Audrey Wood.

Battle of Angels
, which Williams began under the working title “Shadow of My Passion,” was, according to its author, “a huge advance over its predecessors.” “I am packing into it practically all that I have felt about life,” he wrote. Williams’s first full-scale attempt “to fuse lyricism and realism,” the play represented “the country of [his] childhood.” “Onto it I projected the violent symbols of my adolescence. It was a synthesis of the two parts of my life already passed through. And so the history of the play begins anterior to the impulse to write it. It begins as far back as I remember, in the mysterious landscape of the Delta country, the smoky quality of light in the late afternoons when I, as a child, accompanied my grandfather, an Episcopal clergyman, on seemingly endless rounds of rural parishioners,” he said.

Working on
Battle of Angels

The play was a personal, opaque, overwrought, somewhat absurd parable about a dying, penny-pinching ogre of a husband (Jabe), a dutiful, desolate wife (Myra), trapped by economic circumstance into a humiliating, loveless marriage, and a free-spirited young bundle of sexual charisma (Val), whose exciting presence rattles the cage of propriety in the pious, hidebound rural community of Two Rivers, Mississippi.

In the character of Val, Williams made a myth of his remodeled self. He imbued the wanderer with his overheated imagination (“one of my biggest troubles,” Val says), his fictionalized age (twenty-five), his own former eccentric work habits (selling shoes while writing poems on shoeboxes), his haunted promiscuity (Val is dogged by the mysterious Woman from Waco), his literary aspirations (Val is writing a book—“When people read it, they’re going to be frightened. They’ll say it’s crazy because it tells the truth!”), and a surname, Xavier, that sounded like “Savior,” and resembled Sevier, a distinguished name in the Williams genealogy, which linked the family to the first governor of Tennessee. In fact, before settling on “Tennessee” as his literary persona, Williams had considered using “Valentine Sevier” as his own pseudonym. In choosing the name “Tennessee,” Williams had styled himself as a kind of pioneer. Val Xavier is cut from a similarly intrepid mythic mold: he is a pilgrim soul of sorts—“Says he’s exploring the world an’ ev’rything in it!” according to one local gossip—who offers the community of Two Rivers a new kind of transcendence. For the shy Williams, who claimed to “always feel that I bore people and that I’m too ugly,” Val was a totem of Williams’s newfound instinctual liberation and a transparent piece of autoerotic wish-fulfillment. “I, too, am beginning to feel an immense need to become a savage and to create a new world,” the play’s epigram, words from August Strindberg to Paul Gauguin, reads.

Answering to the nickname “Snakeskin” (he wears a snakeskin jacket), Val is an agent of change. Newly arrived in town, he wanders into a dry-goods store looking for work. Soon he has called life out of the store’s joyless proprietress, Myra, and the other local womenfolk. “Decent is something that’s scared like a little rabbit,” he tells Myra. “I’ll give you a better word, Myra. . . . Love.” Val’s vagabond swagger captures the women’s imagination: they ogle him, they are confounded by him, they fantasize about him, they pursue him. His presence broadcasts the primacy of passion over reason; in Two Rivers, it makes him an almost immediate subject of scandal and concern. “Passion is something to be proud of,” the town’s wild child and cynic, Cassandra (“Sandra”) Whiteside, tells him, one fugitive kind to another. “It’s the only one of the little alphabet blocks they give us to play with that seems to stand for anything of importance.” While the women of the town project their longing onto Val, the threatened men set out to drive Val’s free spirit away and finally to destroy it.