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) (127 page)

“
You Were Never Lovelier
,” Newman told her, evoking the title of her 1942 movie.

“Thank you, dear,” she said. “I’ve had a lifetime of compliments, but now they fall on suspicious ears. I know what I look like. I know what time it is. Like Alexandra del Lago, I, too, am battling that old enemy, time.”

“Would you be our Alexandra?” Brooks asked her.

“Let me think about it.” She turned to Newman and took his hand, holding it up to her cheek. “This beautiful man here and I could light up the screen, like Glenn and I did in
Gilda
.”
[She was referring, of course, to her frequent co-star, Glenn Ford.]

The maid came back into her living room with three more highballs, but when she started to hand a drink to Brooks, Rita motioned for her not to. “If you have to go, I understand,” Rita said. Brooks did not have to leave so soon. “I’d like Paul to remain behind. We can sit in my garden and talk about appearing on the screen together. It’ll give us a chance to discover each other. I think in this role I can show the world I have some depth. All my life, Rita Hay-worth has had only a few good moments, everything else was about image.”

At the door, she kissed Brooks on the cheek. “Thank you for coming, dear one,” she said. “We’ll see if this offer leads to anything.” He noticed that she was holding Newman’s hand at that point.

“Well, you two take care,” he said.

Brooks was the source of information about the meeting between Newman and Rita, and the director knew nothing of what happened after he left. Newman never confided in him.

Brooks’ last memory of Rita was her standing with Newman at the doorway and looking into his eyes. Her gaze was penetrating, yet somehow suspicious. Her final statement was somewhat enigmatic. He would remember it for years.

“Before the night is over, I must convince Paul I’m not Gilda.”

A few weeks later, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer rejected the idea of casting Rita.

—Tennessee, After Seeing the Movie Adaptation of Sweet Bird of Youth

Sweet Bird of Youth
, in a “castrated” version, wouldn’t reach the screen until 1962. As the gigolo and the fading actress he serviced, it starred the actors who had originally made it famous on Broadway, Paul Newman and Geraldine Page.

Repeating their Broadway roles were Rip Torn and Madeleine Sherwood. Ed Begley was contracted to play Boss Finley in the film version, as was Shirley Knight to appear as Heavenly, the girlfriend. The very talented character actress, Mildred Dunnock, was assigned to the role of Heavenly’s Aunt Nonny, who is sympathetic to Chance.

The contract that legally committed him to an appearance as Chance Wayne in the film represented Newman’s most lucrative financial deal to date, ensuring him a fee of $350,000 for his performance, plus a percentage of the take. He’d finally arrived on the A-list of movie stars, where he would remain for a very long time.

Because of studio pressure, Richard Brooks was forced to water down the original script, just as he’d been ordered to do in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
. Instead of a castration, Chance suffered a beating at the hands of Boss Finley’s goons.

And instead of being infected with a venereal disease, Heavenly undergoes an abortion. The biggest change, and one that infuriated Tennessee, was the happy ending Brooks added to the film. Heavenly and Chance run away, presumably toward a happy future, although that hardly seems likely after what has come down before.

Sweet Bird of Youth
, advertised with slogans that included
HE USED LOVE LIKE MOST MEN USE MONEY
, premiered on March 21, 1962. Unlike the play, the vanilla film version of Tennessee’s drama bombed, as audiences stayed away in droves. For the most part, film critics panned the movie. But when it came time for Academy Award nominations,
Sweet Bird
, in spite of its flaws, was not ignored.

The film brought Academy Award nominations for some of its actors, including Geraldine Page as Best Actress in a Leading Role. She would lose that year to Anne Bancroft, who had appeared in
The Miracle Worker
. Shirley Knight was nominated as Best Actress in a Supporting Role. But it was Ed Begley, nominated as Best Actor in a Supporting Role, who walked off with an actual Oscar.

It took another quarter of a century for
Sweet Bird of Youth
to open in a theater in London’s West End. It premiered on July 8, 1985, at London’s Haymarket Theatre. Lauren Bacall, formerly known as “Bogie’s Baby,” played the role of Alexandra del Lago. She was certainly typecast as a faded film actress.

In a foolish decision, Elizabeth Taylor in 1989 agreed to star as Alexandra del Lago in a remake of the film. She captured none of the nuances of Geraldine Page and gave one of the flattest on-screen characterizations of her career.

Casting actor Mark Harmon as Chance made the few viewers who watched the 1989 version of
Sweet Bird
realize just how good Newman and Geraldine had been in the original, both on stage and on the screen.

Troy Donahue, more of a male pin-up than an actor, burst onto the screen in the late 1950s. He was blonde, blue-eyed, blandly handsome and often confused with Tab Hunter, his rival. He and another blonde, Sandra Dee, had their fifteen minutes of fame in such saccharine movies as
A Summer Place
(1959). That same year, Donahue and Dee had also packaged themselves into that Lana Turner soaper,
Imitation of Life
.

Donahue was smart enough to know that his place in the Hollywood Sun would soon turn to Twilight, as the pretty boys of the 1950s faded into the reality of the 1960s with the emergence of such newer “anti-heroes” as Dustin Hoffman.

Long before Tab Hunter tried to reverse the downward spiral of his career through appearances on Broadway with Tallulah Bankhead in
The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore
, Troy made an aggressive assault on Tennessee. He felt that if he snared the role of the good-looking hustler in the film version of
Sweet Bird of Youth
, he would reach an entirely new audience, and demonstrate to studios that he could tackle a really tough dramatic role.

Donahue’s career had been launched by the King of the Casting Couch, Henry Willson, who changed the name of a lowly truck driver (Roy Fitzgerald) and put him on the road to stardom as Rock Hudson. During his reign from 1957 to 1967, Rock became the most popular movie star in the world. Willson, the controversial gay starmaker of the 1950s, also played a major role in the film careers of Rory Calhoun, Tab Hunter, Alain Delon, Robert Wagner, and Guy Madison.

Willson changed Donahue’s name from Merle Johnson to Troy Donahue, and he became what Inside Hollywood called “the latest slab of beef on Willson’s Meat Rack.”

Willson got Troy a role in Rock Hudson’s
The Tarnished Angels
(1957). The other men in Willson’s stable asked Hudson about their clan’s newest blonde stallion: “Great cocksucker, tiny dick,” Hudson responded.

Tennessee had attended some of Will-son’s all-male parties, and subsequently, he telephoned the playwright and asked him to arrange a private dinner with Donahue. “He’s the new James Dean,” Willson assured Tennessee.

Over dinner, Tennessee was most gracious to Donahue, who was making himself plainly available, as he’d been instructed to do. What Donahue, or even Willson, didn’t know was that Tennessee preferred dark-complexioned, Mediterranean-derived young men, to the All-American blonde look, as represented at the time by Donahue.

At one point in the evening, Tennessee told Troy, “I understand that you invade the fantasies of pubescent girls. My Chance Wayne is different. He’s a hardened hustler who is running out of time. You look like you have several years to go before the bloom fades from the rose.”

“I can play a different type,” Donahue said. “I wish you’d seen me in
Imitation of Life
. I was cast as this sullen thug who beats up his mulatto girl friend, played by Susan Kohner. I was a racist brute.”

“My night with Troy did not end up in bed,” Tennessee recalled in the aftermath of their dinner together. “I did not go for his facile charm, or even for his looks. He seemed quite shocked when I rejected his invitation for a roll in the hay. I don’t think anybody had ever turned him down before.”

“However, I was still a bad boy. I promised I’d recommend him for the role of Chance Wayne, although I knew that some bigger names, perhaps Paul Newman, would eventually be signed for the role instead. Even Elvis was eager to play the role, even though I doubted whether Colonel Tom Parker would let him do it.”

“Not really wanting to deal with Troy, I quit accepting his phone calls,” Tennessee said. “This seriously pissed him off.”

Through Willson, Tennessee began to hear reports that Donahue had begun drinking early in the day. “He tells me he’s got to have a drink or two before facing the cameras.”

Three weeks later, Willson complained again to Tennessee. “Troy is mixing codeine with his vodka.”

Unlike Tennessee, his friend and rival playwright, William Inge, had more than a few sexual interludes with Donahue, who hustled him for the male leads in
Bus Stop
with Marilyn Monroe and also for a role in
Picnic
with Kim Novak.
[The male lead in
Bus Stop
eventually went to Don Murray, with the starring male lead in
Picnic
going to William Holden.]

Even after the failure of those inaugural attempts to extract commitments from Inge for a starring role in one of his plays, Donahue made additional attempts to seduce Inge during his campaign to snag the male lead in Inge’s screenplay for
Splendor in the Grass
(1961), opposite Natalie Wood. That film’s director, Elia Kazan, eventually awarded the coveted role to Warren Beatty.

Donahue made one final attempt at stardom, “moving heaven and hell” to play John F. Kennedy in
PT 109
, but losing out to Cliff Robertson—after Beatty rejected the role.

In the wake of all these lost opportunities, Troy sank so deeply into despair that his house at 1234 Wetherly Drive in Los Angeles became known for its midday drug orgies. Guy Madison once visited it, discovering that Donahue was “completely zonked. He didn’t know what planet he was on. The house was filled with degenerates just hanging on and hanging out. Everybody was drugged.”

At one point, Donahue became involved with Lili Kardell, who became his fiancée in 1961. A minor actress, she had appeared in a Nazi-themed spy comedy entitled
Looking for Danger
, but was even better known for going out on two or three dates with James Dean. Kardell eventually filed an assault-and-battery suit against Donahue, seeking damages of exactly $60,450.

An out-of-court settlement was reached as a means of avoiding public exposure of Donahue’s violence and drug addiction.

Tanked up on alcohol and fueled by LSD, a belligerent Donahue arrived at a Hollywood party attended by Tennessee. LSD had set off adverse psychiatric reactions in Donahue, filling him with anxiety, paranoia, and delusions.

He had developed a hatred toward scriptwriters and directors, especially gay ones. He retained particularly intense hatreds for Kazan, Tennessee, and Inge. In his paranoia, Donahue held Tennessee responsible for the failure of his career, and for not coming through with the role of Chance Wayne in
Sweet Bird of Youth. [Actually, as defined by the terms of his contract, Tennessee didn’t have the power to cast the role even if he’d wanted to give the part to Donahue.]

Donahue had told Willson that, “Tennessee just used me and discarded me.” Perhaps in his delusion, he’d substituted Tennessee for William Inge, who had to a greater extent trivialized and taken advantage of his career-related hopes, ambitions, and dreams.