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) (13 page)

When the subject of Lana Turner came up, Hepburn flashed anger.

“That god damn bottle of bleach practically threw herself at Spencer when they made that movie,” Hepburn said.

She was referring to the 1941 release of
Dr
.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, starring Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman, and Lana.

The irony of Hepburn’s snub of Tennessee was that he would one day create two of her most memorable roles—that of Violet Venable in
Suddenly Last Summer
and that of Amanda in the television version of
The Glass Menagerie
.

He chose not to mention her brilliant portrayals in his memoirs, referring to Hepburn only once, and not in a very flattering way. “Has anyone ever understood the gallantry and charm of old ladies, in and out of the theater, as well as Giraudoux in
The Madwoman of Chaillot?”
he wrote. “Kate Hepburn was just not old enough or mad enough to suggest the charisma of their lunacy.”

On another hot afternoon, Tennessee got to meet the love goddess herself, Lana Turner, who called on him at his office. She was obviously very pregnant.

Instead of discussing the script with him, she poured out her marriage woes. “I should say her ‘lack of marriage’ woes,” he said.

In July of 1942, she’d married a handsome, unemployed young man of whom she knew little. As she explained to Tennessee, she didn’t know that he had been previously married.

She suggested that, “My personal situation might be an interesting plot device to enliven
Marriage Is a Private Affair
.”

She explained that Stephen Crane’s divorce from his first wife, Carol Kurtz, had not become final at the time of her marriage, and as a means of avoiding charges of bigamy, she was going to have to seek an annulment. “That seems like a respectable way out of the mess,” he told her.

“No, it’s more complicated than that,” she said. “I don’t know if I want to re-marry Steve just to legitimize my unborn child. When I told that to Steve, he went crazy. That night, he drove his car over the cliff above where I was living, hoping his car would crash into my house on the way down. But the thick underbrush on the hill brought his car to a halt. Perhaps you could also work that actual event into a plot device for
Marriage
. In other words, an event torn from the pages of real life. And two nights ago, he tried to overdose on sleeping pills and had to be rushed to Cedars of Lebanon in critical condition.”

“For god’s sake, Lana,” he said. “Marry the man if he’s any good in bed.”

“Oh, it’s not that,” she said. “He’s a great lover.”

“Finding a man who’s great in the sack is its own reward,” he said. “Based on my experience, such a creature is a rare commodity.”

“That may be true,” she said. “But life is so complicated. Right now, I’m trying to get Frank Sinatra to marry me as soon as I have my child. If he has to wait around for me to remarry Steve, have the child, and whatever, he might divorce Nancy and marry not me, but Marilyn Maxwell. Nancy’s a brunette, and Frank told me he’s starved for blondes.”

She told Tennessee that because of a lot of expenses, “I am flat broke and the bills are piling up.” She asked him if she could take home some pages from the
Marriage
script to read.

The next day, she called, complaining that she was “dumbfounded by a lot of the dialogue. It’s so poetic. My character is not a poet. Can’t you make her speak like a regular woman?”

He later claimed in his memoirs that he had avoided “any language that was at all eclectic or multisyllabic. But the dialogue was beyond the young lady’s comprehension.”

When he wrote his play,
Small Craft Warnings
, later in his life, Tennessee would have his character of Quentin, an elderly writer, comment about his experience in Hollywood. “They found me too literate on my first assignment, converting an epic into a vehicle for the producer’s doxy, a grammar school dropout.”

Tennessee was obliquely referring to producer Pandro S. Berman and to Lana.
[Synonyms for
doxy
include bimbo, floozy, hoochie, hussy, minx, slut, tramp, trollop, wench, and whore.]

Two weeks later, there was another knock on Tennessee’s office door. In walked John Hodiak, the son of Ukrainian immigrants who was being promoted by MGM as “another Clark Gable.” Quiet spoken and likeable, he was ruggedly masculine and handsome in his rough kind of way. “To me, he was the stuff of a wet dream,” Tennessee later confided.

Hodiak had just learned big casting news: Clark Gable had turned down the lead role in
Marriage
, and that role had subsequently been assigned to the handsome heartthrob, James Craig.
[Ironically, MGM had billed Craig as “another Clark Gable,” too.]

Hodiak told Tennessee that he’d be assuming the role of Lt. Tom West that would have been played by Gene Kelly. The purpose of Hodiak’s invitation to lunch became all too clear over a chicken club sandwich. He wanted his role expanded at the expense of Craig’s part as Captain Miles Lancing.

Over lunch, Tennessee later said, “I found John marriage material. With him in my bed at night, I would abandon cruising forever,”

He’d seen Hodiak and Tallulah Bankhead in their 1944 film,
Lifeboat
, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. “I just assumed that Tallulah had already sunk her greedy claws into this walking streak of sex,” Tennessee said.

“When John excused himself to go to the men’s room, I shamelessly followed him, pretending I had to go, too,” Tennessee claimed. “I stood beside him at the urinal. What he hauled out was an economy size penis the size of a Budweiser can. And it was still flaccid. By that time, I was hopelessly in love, and I made my intentions very obvious. He continued to exhibit for me, even with a few extra shakes at the end, but he turned down my invitation, even an offer for a quickie in my office with the door locked.”

“I liked John a lot, but he was not a desperate sailor on a brief shore leave,” Tennessee claimed. “From what I heard, he had all the poontang he could handle. In a 1944 picture he made with Anne Baxter, called
Sunday Dinner for a Soldier
, he fell for her. They later got married. But that didn’t stop him from seducing Gene Tierney when he played Major Joppolo in
A Bell for Adano
(1945). That is, when Miss Tierney was not entertaining John F. Kennedy.”

“Later, to my horror, I learned that Lana had seduced John when they made
Marriage Is a Private Affair,”
Tennessee said. “Unlike me, Lana always got her man except for Tyrone Power, who finally fled from her clutches. But I understand he really preferred boys.”

“I was very sorry to hear that John had been labeled as ‘box office poison’ by exhibitors in the late 1940s,” Tennessee said. “The era of rugged masculinity was on the way out to make room for Henry Willson’s pretty boys of the 1950s—Robert Wagner, Troy Donahue, Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis, Tab Hunter, and the ilk.”

“When John died of a heart attack at the age of 41, I think Hollywood lost a special actor. There was nothing phony about him. He was all man, and how many of those are left?”

After weeks of work, Tennessee was called upon by Berman to produce the script he’d created for Lana. He’d completed no more than twelve pages. The star “hated it,” and Berman told Tennessee “the part you’ve attempted to write is too fey for a woman like Lana. You are fired. But since you’re under contract, I’m punishing you by giving you a six-week suspension without pay. When you come back, I’ll give you a new assignment so simple even a child could write it.”

In the aftermath of Tennessee’s firing, Ring Lardner, Jr.
[a screen writer who, later, was famously accused of being a Communist sympathizer during McCarthy’s Red Scare of the 1950s]
was assigned the task of adapting
Marriage
for the screen, since nothing Tennessee wrote was usable. But even such a well known and talented screenwriter as Lardner was also removed from the project, the final screen credits going to David Hertz and Lenore J. Coffee.

[Lana Turner agreed to remarry Stephen Crane, although the marriage was doomed almost from the beginning. Cheryl Christine Crane, the only child she’d ever have, was born on July 25, 1943
.

Marriage Is a Private Affair
was released in 1944, starring Lana, James Craig, and John Hodiak. That same year, Lana divorced Crane.]

Reinstated by the studio after his six-week suspension, Tennessee returned to his office at MGM. Back on the job, he contemplated writing a ballad for a movie short,
Billy the Kid
, with gay composer Aaron Copland and gay choreographer Eugene Loring. In a letter to his close friend, fellow author Donald Windham, he claimed that he found Loring “so cute, all five feet three inches of him.”

Nothing of any merit ever materialized from Tennessee’s arduous work on
Billy the Kid
, despite his best intentions and the many hours he spent fretting about it. The 1938 ballet, written by Copland and choreographed by Loring, became one of the most popular of its era, widely known for its development of an American ballet idiom and its skillful incorporation of American folk songs.

During Tennessee’s “flirtation” with the project, he spent more time making love to Loring than on his ballad to the western outlaw.

Chapter Five