Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) (11 page)

In anger, Hopkins called her own press conference, denouncing the members of Boston’s City Council. “I suggest that these blue-nosed city fathers be flung into the Boston Harbor like the tea at the historic Boston Tea Party.”

At the play’s run, the Theater Guild in New York notified Tennessee that it was dropping its option on
Battle of Angels
. “It cannot be brought to Broadway,” Tennessee was told. “It is not dramatically successful.”

He entered into a months-long depression, and for a time was almost suicidal. “But,” as he later recalled, “I did not self-destruct easily.” He predicted that he would live to see
Battle of Angels
open on Broadway.

In the years to come, he would brush the dust off
Battle of Angels
, and continue to rewrite it, hoping for a “kind of perfection” he never obtained, at least not critically.

In 1957, Tennessee finally presented
Battle of Angels
on Broadway in the form of a rewritten adaptation,
Orpheus Descending
. He had reworked the play, reshaping the plot, characters, and dialogue.

The play still dealt with passion and repression and was replete with lush, poetic dialogue and imagery. It was a modern retelling of the ancient Greek legend of Orpheus, searching the Underworld in an attempt to resuscitate his lover, Euridice.

In Manhattan, Tennessee went to the apartment of Marlon Brando, urging him to accept the role of Val Xavier on the stage, since the male role had not only been enlarged, but vastly improved. He assured the actor that
Orpheus Descending
would bring him even greater acclaim than his role of Stanley Kowalski in
A Streetcar Named Desire
(1947).

“I like some of the lines,” Brando said, “particularly when Val classifies people into three types—‘the buyers, the bought, and those who don’t belong to no place at all.’”

“But this boy Val never takes a stand,” Brando continued. “I don’t really know what he’s for or against. Well, you can’t act in a vacuum.”

Eventually, Robert Loggia was assigned the role, but after Loggia was dismissed during the play’s previews in Philadelphia, it was taken over by Cliff Robertson.

Tennessee later claimed that he thought Robertson was “too clean cut and American to capture the undeniable animal erotic energy and appeal of Val. Brando could have pulled it off.”

Maureen Stapleton, whom Tennessee often described as “my favorite actress,” starred in the Broadway version as Lady, although in the play’s eventual reworking into a movie,
[
entitled
The Fugitive Kind]
, she’d be reduced to playing the very minor role of Vee Talbot, the wife of the local sheriff. As Stapleton ruefully observed, “Sometimes the acceptance of a lesser role, regardless of how humiliating, is the question of a paycheck.”

Before the play opened for its very brief run, Tennessee told
The New York Times, “
It is still the tale of a wild-spirited boy who wanders into a conventional community of the South and creates the commotion of a fox in a chicken coop. But beneath the surface it is a play about unanswered questions that haunt the hearts of people, as well as the acceptance of prescribed answers that are not answers at all.”

As he left the theater, Tennessee was greeted with catcalls and boos. “I just booed right back,” he said.

Critics sharpened their knives for their assault on him.
The New Yorker
ignored the play’s poetry, labeling it as “cornpone melodrama.” Other reviews weren’t much better.

A depressed Tennessee told the press, “I feel I am no longer acceptable to the theater public. Maybe they’ve had too much of a certain dish, and don’t want to eat any more from my plate.”

—Tennessee Williams

It took two decades, but finally,
Battle of Angels
reached the screen with a new title—
The Fugitive Kind
. At long last, Tennessee got his wish. Marlon Brando signed to appear as Val (“Snakeskin”) Xavier, the guitar-playing drifter.

Anna Magnani was cast as Lady, with Joanne Woodward appearing as the second female lead, that of Carol Cutrere, an alcoholic nymphomaniac.

Sidney Lumet signed on as the film’s director, although he would later face critical attacks, the
Chicago Reader
claiming, “He is completely baffled by the Gothic South and doesn’t quite know what to do with the overlay of Greek myth either.”

Anthony Franciosa, the husband of Shelley Winters, Brando’s former girlfriend, had agreed to star as Val for $75,000. But Lumet went after Brando when he heard that his bank account was bare, drained not only by his divorce from Anna Kashfi but from the financial failure of his film studio, Pennebaker.

Lumet showed up on Brando’s doorstep with an offer of one million dollars. Without hesitation, Brando said, “Sign me up,” although he still felt the character of Val Xavier was “a playwright’s failure.”

He was also concerned that Anna Magnani, in a stronger role, “will wipe my ass off the screen.”

The Fugitive Kind
was not shot in the South, but in Milton, New York, a small town eighty miles north of Manhattan.

Both Lumet and Tennessee feared the meeting of Brando with Magnani, Tennessee likening it to “two hydrogen bombs going off at the same time.”

Both Tennessee and Lumet were unaware that a younger and sexier Brando had seduced a younger and sexier Magnani on her home turf in Rome years before.

In a private agreement with Lumet, Tennessee agreed to act as a referee between Brando and Magnani. At first, she was enthusiastic. “When I work with Marlon, it is like working with a strange animal about to pounce. It’s a wonderful experience to see him so realistic. So completely
all
man.”

Brando had a different view about her, confiding to Tennessee, “When I encountered
La Lupa [her nickname]
, I discovered that she had turned into an Italian Tallulah Bankhead, an older creature and one even more sexually aggressive than before. She is that kind of woman, like Tallulah, who makes me flinch. Nothing but a sexual predator and a caricature of the actress she used to be. She once possessed a certain raw beauty. She has now reached the borderline of old and ugly.”

Armed with this information, Tennessee tried to discourage Magnani in any fantasy she might have had about pursuing Brando to bed him. At that point, she had not told him of her long-ago adventure with him in Rome.

In his autobiography, Brando confessed what happened when he accepted Magnani’s invitation to visit her in her suite during rehearsals for
The Fugitive Kind
.

“She started kissing me with great passion,” he wrote. “I tried to be responsive, because I knew she was worried about growing older and losing her beauty. As a matter of kindness, I felt I had to return her kisses. But once she got her arms around me, she wouldn’t let go. I started to pull away, but she held me tight and bit my lip, which really hurt.”

[He also wrote:
“With her teeth gnawing at my lower lip, the two of us locked in an embrace, I was reminded of one of those fatal mating rituals of insects that end when the female administers the coup de grace. We rocked back and forth as she tried to lead me to the bed. My eyes were wide open, and as I looked at her eyeball-to-eyeball, I saw that she was in a frenzy, Attila the Hun in full attack. Finally, the pain got so intense that I grabbed her nose and squeezed it as hard as I could, as if I were squeezing a lemon, to push her away. It startled her, and I made my escape.”]

The next day, Brando informed Tennessee that, “I will never work with Magnani ever again unless I have a rock in my fist.”

After filming wrapped, Tennessee told the press, “Marlon and Anna engaged in a clash of egos never before known in the history of cinema.”

When
The Fugitive Kind
officially opened in April of 1960, it played to nearly empty houses across the country. Exhibitors reported that audiences often left in disgust before “THE END” flashed across the screen.

Lumet, Brando, and Tennessee were “burned alive”
[the playwright’s words]
by the critics. “They wanted not only to behead me, but drink a quart of my tainted blood.”

Brando was also attacked. Critic Clancy Sigal wrote: “Watching Brando imitating Judy Holliday’s impersonation of him in
Bells Are Ringing
is, at its most serious, like seeing a scratchy old film of Duse or Bernhardt; surely someone is kidding someone.”

Time Out
claimed that “despite the film’s stellar credentials, just about everything is wrong in this adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play. Lumet’s direction is either ponderous or pretentious, and he failed to crack the problem of the florid stage dialogue and the dangerously weak role of Brando.”

In an angry flash, Brando phoned Tennessee. “I told you the role of Val Xavier was weak. If only you would have listened to me.” Then, abruptly, he put down the phone.

In Key West, Tallulah Bankhead had just finished a road tour in a play called
Crazy October
. She was staying in the home of its playwright, James Leo Herlihy. Darwin Porter, then the chief of the Key West bureau of
The Miami Herald
, invited Tallulah and Herlihy to a showing of the film in a dingy theater along Duval Street.

To the trio’s surprise, they found Tennessee and his longtime lover, Frank Merlo, sitting directly behind them.

Tallulah sat patiently through the film adaptation of a play she’d rejected twenty years before. At the end of the screening, she stood up, and in a bellowing voice loud enough to be heard in the back row, she said, “Tennessee
dah-ling
, they’ve made an absolutely dreadful film out of a perfectly awful play.”

Regrettably, this final failure marked what Tennessee called his “funeral rites. There went my once fashionable reputation. Never again would I be the darling of the critics. From then on, the mere mention of my name would bring only the most savage of attacks, those that tore at a human heart. I had to be a tough old bird to continue to write plays at this point in my life.”