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) (27 page)

Tennessee had other published comments to make about Windham, citing his “petty resentments and embittered false pride rubbed sore by too little achievement in too long a career.” He had other epithets as well: Windham was “pernicious, lacking in decency, self-serving, self-deluded, arrogant, derailed, jealous, a squirrel, a scavenger, a peddler, a failed writer, a false friend, around only when he needed something.”

In April of 1985, Windham had some final thoughts about his long lost friend.

In the wake of Tennessee’s death, Windham wrote: “There has been scarcely a day in the last forty years that I have not thought of him. And there seems little chance that I will cease to think of him now.”

Chapter Eight

The stage director and producer
, Margo Jones, was the first to realize the future greatness of Tennessee Williams. He called her “The Texas Tornado.”

As early as 1945, she was producing his
Stairs to the Roof
, a “fantasy” about the International Shoe Company, for which he’d worked, at the Pasadena Playhouse.

[The subtitle of the play, based on earlier stories, is
A Prayer for the Wild of Heart That Are Kept in Cages;
it combines romance and fantasy with a
Deus Ex Machina
ending
. Stairs to the Roof
was based on early stories that Tennessee wrote in the mid-1930s, including one entitled
The Swan.

The play was written after he recovered from a nervous breakdown arising from his employment in that large shoe factory. He admitted that the play was a bit “didactic,” but, even so, considered it suitable for the screen, believing that Burgess Meredith would be ideal as the male lead
.

Six years after the play was written, he wrote some program notes for the Pasadena Playhouse: “When I look back at
Stairs to the Roof,
I see its faults, and very plainly, but still I do not feel apologetic about this play. Unskilled and awkward as I was at this initial period play-wrighting, I certainly had a moral earnestness which I cannot boast of today, and I think that moral earnestness is a good thing for any time. I wish I still had the idealistic passion of (protagonist) Benjamin Murphy. You may smile as I do at the sometimes sophomoric aspect of his excitement, but I hope you will respect, as I do, the purity of his feeling and the honest concern which he had in his heart for the basic problem of mankind, which is to dignify our lives with a certain freedom.”]

Jones, the lesbian dynamo of the theater, had inherited a Texas oil well and used its profits to pursue her passion for the performing arts.

This big, rawboned woman fitted more into West Texas than Fifth Avenue. Their first meeting in a Manhattan brownstone was a disaster. This Amazon frightened Tennessee so much, he excused himself, ostensibly to go to the bathroom. Actually, he fled into the streets. “She scared the daylights out of me,” he recalled. “When I hit the streets, I actually ran.”

Instead of trying to make a deal with Margo, he took a job ushering at Manhattan’s Strand Theater in which he wore a uniform that looked like that of a Prussian general.

Months later, in the bright sunlight of Los Angeles, Margo didn’t look so intimidating, and he dined with her at the Brown Derby, with the suggestion that she might present
You Touched Me!
at the Pasadena Playhouse.
[Written in conjunction with Donald Windham, this was the play that prompted Lewis Nichols at The New York Times to write: “Every playwright is entitled to a slight fall from grace occasionally. “You Touched Me!” is Mr. Williams’s.]
.

At the time of their Derby luncheon, Tennessee, otherwise fretting over a suitable cinematic vehicle for Lana Turner at MGM, was working on a play called
The Gentleman Caller
.

In Key West, Tennessee recalled to Darwin Porter the most memorable part of that dinner. “Rosalind Russell arrived late and joined us for dinner. Ten minutes into the conversation, I realized that Margo and Rosalind were lovers. Whereas Rosalind on the screen might appear to be in love with Cary Grant, off screen, her secret passion was for Margo. That love affair had a certain irony. At the time, Rosalind was married to Frederick Brisson, the producer. He was in love with Cary Grant. Hollywood love affairs get very complicated.”

As he came to know Margo, Tennessee bonded with her, claiming “she had the energy of Niagara Falls and an enthusiasm which is either irresistible or overwhelming.”

Eventually, he became fascinated by Margo, who had spent a year in India and written a book on Hindu philosophy. She’d traveled around the world and had directed plays for seven years in Houston.

She’d used the profits from her oil well to launch herself into regional theater, introducing the theater-in-the-round concept to audiences in Dallas. In time, she would stage 85 plays in Dallas, 57 of which were new.

Later, it was Tennessee who brought Margo into the Broadway production of
The Glass Menagerie
, where she served as assistant producer to Eddie Dowling.

She would later direct Tennessee’s
Summer and Smoke
, a flop when it opened for the first time in 1948, but highly regarded years later. Geraldine Page would be Oscar-nominated for her film performance in
Summer and Smoke (1961)
. Margo also directed the original Broadway version of Maxwell Anderson’s
Joan of Lorraine
1946) starring Ingrid Bergman, who would repeat her performance as
Joan of Arc
(1948), a film for which she was Oscar-nominated.

Night after night, Margo and Tennessee worked to bring
You Touched Me!
to Pasadena. Somewhere in her booze-soaked mind, Margo came up with the idea she wanted to marry Tennessee.

When his father, Cornelius Williams, came to Los Angeles to visit his son, he was introduced to Margo. “She was bored and drank a quart of liquor and performed a half-clothed wild dance around the room.” When she left, Cornelius warned his son about the “dangers of marrying a drunkard woman. Of course, I’ve been known to have a few drinks myself.”

In 1944, Tennessee wrote Margo that he was finishing
The Gentleman Caller “
as an act of compulsion, not love. Just some weird necessity to get my sister on paper.”

[He was referring to Rose Isabel Williams. As a young girl, she had sunk into madness, throwing violent fits and talking explicitly about sex with her puritanical mother, Edwina. She was threatening to murder her father for his rape of her
.

Although lobotomies were relatively rare at the time, such a procedure was recommended for Rose
.

Her skull would be opened, as a brain surgeon would sever the nerve fibers between the thalamus and the frontal lobes
.

Tennessee would later use the real-life drama on the stage in
Suddenly Last Summer,
when Katharine Hepburn (as Violet Venable) urged Doctor Montgomery Clift to perform a lobotomy on Elizabeth Taylor
.

For the rest of his life, Tennessee would be haunted by Rose’s dangerous operation. “I always felt that somehow, I failed Rose. Perhaps I could have stopped it if I had been there when Edwina and those butchers were making that ghastly decision to cut open Rose’s head. It’s true Rose had sexual fantasies. But that’s all they were—fantasies. I’ve had sexual fantasies. Who hasn’t?”]

After his departure from his employment at MGM in Los Angeles, Tennessee finished writing
The Gentleman Caller
in the dormitory of some law school students at Harvard University. At some point, he changed the title of this “memory play” to
The Glass Menagerie
.