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) (48 page)

On a windy, blustery New York day, Kazan encountered Brando at the Actors Studio where he’d returned in spite of his threat to abandon his studies there. “I’ve called Tennessee,” Kazan told him. “He’s waiting for you on the Cape. He wants to hear you read for the part of Stanley. If he goes for you, you’ve got the part. Of course, we can always have your blonde hair dyed brown.”

“How am I going to get there?” Brando asked. “I’m broke.”

“I’ll lend you twenty,” Kazan said, reaching into his pocket.

Years later, Kazan recalled that moment in the history of the theater with a touch of melodramatic nostalgia. “Marlon headed for the Cape to meet Tennessee. It was to be a date with destiny!”

With the twenty dollars in his pocket that Kazan had given him, Brando devoured all the food he could eat. “I was starving,” he recalled. “Hadn’t eaten a square meal in two days. Just peanut butter without any bread.”

With the money he had left over, he bought groceries for Celia Webb, his girl friend from Colombia, and her son. Stashing the young boy with a friend, Celia joined Brando on the trip to Provincetown to read for Tennessee. Since neither of them at this point had any money, Brando stuck out his thumb, hitchhiking along the way and bumming food wherever they could find it. Celia and Brando arrived in P-Town three days late. “In a tizzy,” Tennessee had given up all hope of his “star” ever showing up. Kazan had warned him how undependable the actor was.

It turned out that Brando and Celia had to hitch rides with at least eight different drivers before finally reaching the tip of Cape Cod.

In Tennessee’s battered cottage, Brando recalled that, “The toilet was overflowing with shit. That shit was swimming onto the tile floor—no one had mopped it up. I dug my bare hand into the toilet and pulled out what looked like a human fetus before delivery. Before I got there, Tennessee’s motley crew had been using the bushes. Even the lights were out. Tennessee said they had been ‘plunged into everlasting darkness.’ I even fixed the God damn electricity using copper pennies in the fuse box.”

Sharing the Provincetown house with Tennessee were two strong-willed dames from Texas, producer Margo Jones and her estranged companion, Joanna Albus. The two women had come to the Cape to meet with Tennessee about mounting a production in Texas of
Summer and Smoke
.

Nicknamed “The Texas Tornado” by Tennessee, Jones had spent a period of her life directing plays on Broadway before heading back to the Southwest, landing in Dallas where she’d launched a repertory group named Theatre ’47. Tennessee referred to Joanna as “the Tornado’s sidekick.” Later, Joanna would become assistant stage manager during
Streetcar’s
stint on Broadway.

Early gossip in P-Town linked Tennessee romantically with Margo until Joanna arrived on the scene to “set these gay boys straight.” In Key West, Tennessee once said, “I have never been especially attracted to lesbians, although there has been a notable exception here and there.”

Also sharing the cottage was Pancho Rodriguez, Tennessee’s notoriously jealous Mexican lover. At first Pancho threatened to leave P-Town and travel to New Orleans if Brando spent the night. He was just as jealous of Brando as he’d been on the first night they’d met years before. Tennessee prevailed upon Pancho to stay, and he did, although he refused to stick around for Brando’s reading.

As he had before, Brando bonded with Tennessee, finding him “a pristine soul who suffered from a deep-seated neurosis, a sensitive, gentle man destined to destroy himself.”

In his autobiography, Brando noted, but only casually, that the playwright was a homosexual, “but not effeminate or outwardly aggressive about it. There was something eating at his insides that ultimately propelled him to his death.”

Tennessee later recalled that “all of us were drunk when Brando read for the part of Stanley.” Taking the role he secretly coveted for himself, Tennessee played Blanche. He didn’t need a script.

“The reading lasted less than two minutes,” Margo recalled. “We just knew that Brando was destined to be Stanley. I let out a Texas whoop like I do at the rodeo.”

At first Tennessee didn’t say anything after hearing Brando read. His face looked as if he had disappointed Tennessee, who just sat there in a wicker peacock chair intently studying Brando as he sucked smoke through a hygienic cigarette holder full of absorbent crystals. “The part is yours!” Tennessee finally said.

Leaving the women to prepare the beds for the night, Tennessee invited Brando for a midnight stroll on the same beach where he’d seduced him some time before. Pancho had gone to the bars in P-Town, and the playwright didn’t expect him to return to the cottage any time soon.

Tennessee later recalled that neither Brando nor he said a word. “No mention was made of
Streetcar
. In the moonlight, I had never seen a man of such extraordinary beauty.”

The myth about Tennessee never making a pass at his actors has been perpetuated, often in biographies, for decades. The playwright’s longtime lover, Frank Merlo, Pancho’s eventual replacement, claimed that the statement was true in a technical sense. “But we’re splitting hairs here. Tenn never made a pass at actors. They made passes at him. Or, rather, they made themselves available to him. On the beach that night—Tenn told me this himself—he didn’t have to grope Brando. Brando whipped it out for Tenn. What gay man worth his salt wouldn’t have taken advantage of that? Tenn was only human. And Brando was his sexual fantasy. In Tenn’s mixed-up head, Brando and Stanley Kowalski had meshed into the same erotic image. Theirs was hardly a love affair, like Tenn and me. Brando was rough trade to Tenn. He didn’t mind servicing the stud.”

Tennessee was less than candid in his memoirs, claiming (inaccurately) that he kept the relationship businesslike between Brando and himself. “I have never played around with actors,” Tennessee falsely claimed. “It is a point of morality with me. And anyhow Brando was not the type to get a part that way.”

Perhaps that was true, but it didn’t take into account that Brando had seduced playwrights before, often very famous ones.

Back in his cottage at one o’clock in the morning, Tennessee noted that Pancho still hadn’t returned from the bars. Brando claimed he was starving. No great chef, Tennessee went into the kitchen and made him a ham sandwich. The ham was dry, the bread stale. He also poured Brando a glass of milk. In one gulp, he finished the milk and then requested the whole quart, which he proceeded to finish off. “Pure Stanley,” Tennessee said.

He kissed Brando on the lips and headed for his own bunk bed. He noted that Celia was asleep under a quilt in a corner of the living room, where Brando went to join her for the night.

The next morning, Tennessee said that Pancho had not returned from his bar crawl of the night before, but Brando didn’t seem unduly concerned. Tennessee lent Brando twenty dollars so he could buy bus tickets back to New York. Leaving the cottage, Brando told Celia that “Tennessee is a very easy touch.”

On the Greyhound bus heading back to New York, Brando never spoke to Celia. He was lost in a world of his own. “I didn’t have anything to say to her because my mind was completely occupied with how to play Stanley. I feared the part was too big for me. A sense of terror, unlike any I’d known before, came over me. I was shaking and sweating a lot. Celia tried to comfort me, but no one could. A demon was taking over inside me and squeezing my guts.”

With Brando out the door, Tennessee called Kazan in New York. “I want Brando to be Stanley Kowalski. He’s far better than Garfield could ever be.”

When Kazan put down the phone, he called Irene Selznick. “That son of a bitch of a faggot up there on the Cape is riding a crush on Brando.”

Back in his cottage, Tennessee wrote a letter to his literary agent, Audrey Wood, calling Brando a “God-sent Stanley.” He seemed delighted to cast the role eight years younger than he had written it. In the letter, he praised Brando for delivering “the best reading I have ever heard,” and that coming from an actor already notorious for his bad readings in which he mumbled, sometimes incoherently. In his letter, Tennessee noted “the physical appeal and sensuality of Brando, at least as much as Burt Lancaster.”

Back in New York for the rehearsals of
Streetcar
, Brando is credited with causing the final break between Tennessee and Pancho. During one particularly violent and jealous argument over Brando, Pancho grabbed Tennessee’s typewriter and tossed it out of the hotel window, seriously injuring a pedestrian below—in fact, almost killing him.

That was all too much for Tennessee. He bought Pancho a one-way ticket to New Orleans and gave him a thousand dollars “to jump-start another life for yourself.”

Pancho had calmed down after the typewriter incident. Pleading and even crying before Tennessee, he begged him to let him stay. “It’s over,” a somewhat callous Tennessee said. “Time to end what should never have begun in the first place.”

On the way out the door, Pancho said, “I hope you and Brando will be very happy together. He’s your fantasy both on stage and off.”

According to Frank Merlo, Tennessee, post-Pancho, “made himself available” to Brando on several occasions during rehearsals and during the long run of
Streetcar
. Brando was not interested. As reported by Frank, Tennessee told him, “The last time I enjoyed Brando was that night on the beach at the Cape. It is a memory I’ll always treasure. If he had wanted to come and live with me, I would have asked Pancho to leave much sooner. But alas, my relationship with Brando never got beyond a blow-job. In my already broken heart, I knew even then that it is a hopeless pursuit every time we go after the unobtainable.”

* * *

Tennessee was inside Manhattan’s New Amsterdam Theatre on October 5, 1947, to watch Brando begin rehearsals. Despite the success of his reading in Provincetown, Brando was not fitting into the role of Stanley Kowalski. Privately, both Tennessee and Kazan recognized that.

On the third day of rehearsals, right in front of both Kazan and Tennessee, Brando virtually fired himself. He shocked Tennessee when he said, “I can’t play this character.”

Kazan remembered Brando “all swearing and trembling with grief and anxiety.”

He turned his face to Kazan, but his words were actually meant for Tennessee, who was hovering nearby with a pained look on his face.

“I hate Stanley Kowalski,” Brando shouted. “He never doubts himself. His ego is so strong. He’s always right—or at least thinks he’s right—and he’s never been afraid. He’s the complete opposite of all the things I am.”

“You’re wonderful in the part because you don’t have to be like Stanley,” Tennessee assured him. “You only have to act like Stanley. This role could be the defining moment of your theatrical career before it has even started.”

Slowly Kazan lured Brando back into the rehearsal hall, putting his arm around him to offer him a kind of macho comfort. “Just think of Stanley as a complete hedonist,” Kazan said. “The type of guy who sucks on a cigar all day because he can’t suck on a teat. He conquers with his penis like you conquer dame after dame with what you call your noble tool.”

During the first week of rehearsals, Tennessee showed up for a assembled gathering on the rooftop terrace of the New Amsterdam, where Florenz Ziegfeld, in the 1920s, had staged midnight musical revues. He circulated among the cast members, speaking to each of them individually. “I’m dying of pancreatic cancer,” Tennessee claimed. Brando and Jessica Tandy, along with Karl Malden and Kim Hunter, were stunned at the news and didn’t know what to say, other than muttering their condolences.

Kazan was already aware that Tennessee “was the world’s most hysterical hypochondriac.” He went over and embraced Tennessee. “Don’t worry,” he told the playwright. “You’re a tough old bird and will live to be a hundred years old—maybe more. Now, let’s get on with the rehearsals of this poetic tragedy.”

As a playwright, Tennessee had originally intended that sympathy generated by the play be directed toward Blanche. But as he sat with Kazan during the weeks of rehearsals, he clearly saw that Brando was altering his original intention. Instead of advising Kazan to restrain him, Tennessee proclaimed, “The boy is a genius! Let’s see what he can do. He’s a Lawrencian fantasy of the earthy proletarian male.” He paused. “A regular midnight cowboy.”

Years later in Key West, Tennessee would share his early reaction with his neighbor, novelist James Leo Herlihy. The writer so liked the expression,
Midnight Cowboy
, that he wrote a novel about it, which was made into the Oscar-winning Best Picture of 1969.

Robert Lewis, one of the founders of Actors’ Studio, showed up one afternoon and sat with Tennessee to watch Brando emote with Jessica Tandy. Then, in an analysis very tuned into the studio’s penchant for unearthing the raw motivation behind an actor’s success at interpreting a role, he said, “Marlon is playing against Dodie, not Tandy as Blanche.”

He had to explain to Tennessee that “Dodie” was the nickname of Brando’s mother, Dorothy Brando.