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) (49 page)

“In your creation of Stanley, Marlon has found the same heavy drinking, the coquettish sexual flirtations, the lost hopes and dreams that he’d experienced with his own mother. He is seeing Dodie up there on that stage—not Tandy. In the rape scene, he finally fulfilled his incestuous wish to deflower his own mother.”

Tennessee was stunned by such an interpretation, not knowing if it were accurate or not.

Lewis dismissed talk of how Brando was slowly and cerebrally “discovering Stanley” as he got deeper and deeper into the role, and offered a far earthier and more pragmatic analysis: “Marlon used his portrayal of Stanley as an excuse to pick up a lot of blue-collar New Jersey truck drivers and give them blow-jobs. That’s how he imbued himself with the semen of Stanley.”

Kazan was not completely aware of the details associated with Brando’s nocturnal adventures during rehearsals for
Streetcar
. Often, on the morning of a scheduled rehearsal, his star actor showed up late. “On some occasions Marlon looked like the shit had been beaten out of him,” Kazan recalled. “Which it probably had. All of the cast knew that Marlon was fucking every woman in sight and, for a change of pace, picking up rough trade along the waterfront.”

Brando invited Shelley Winters and one of his best friends, Carlo Fiore, to attend a rehearsal of
Streetcar
. They sat in the darkened theater with Tennessee between them. Fiore told Tennessee, “Marlon has put that pelvis-thrust forward slouch of his to good use and turned the petulant pout into a snarl. His T-shirt discloses the heavily muscled torso of a truck driver. He mumbles like a moron. He scratches his asshole, digging in deep to get at the itch.”

Lucinda Ballard had worked on costumes for
The Glass Menagerie
, and Tennessee wanted to use her again on
Streetcar
. She met with Tennessee to discuss Brando’s wardrobe. “His skin-tight jeans are tapered to show the muscles in his thighs, and to showcase his genitals. During fittings, Marlon insisted on wearing no underwear. He claimed he wanted the jeans to fit like a second skin.”

Before the opening, Kazan went to Tennessee, saying, “I think Irene was right. Tandy is too strong an actress to play a weak, vulnerable soul like Blanche.”

Consequently, as part of an effort to make her more vulnerable
[and as part of a controversial psychological technique sometimes associated with method acting as espoused during its confrontational early years]
, Kazan ordered Brando, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden to subject her to touch of emotional sadism.

After she was restrained with ropes, the actors made fun of her in the most cruel and potentially destructive say. She was attacked for her “small tits,” her “pus-laden vagina,” her utter “lack of talent,” even her “cunty smell.”

When Tennessee came into the theater and discovered this, he ordered all of them to stop tormenting Tandy. “Are you out of your mind?” Tennessee asked Kazan. “There are limits as to how far you can go in tormenting an actor.”

Brando detested Tandy, simultaneous with having an offstage affair with the actress who played “Stella,” his onstage wife, Blanche’s sister, as interpreted by Kim Hunter.

“Tennessee told me that the only reason Stella, an aristocratic Southern dame, stays with Stanley is because of the way he fucks her,” Brando told Kazan.

Tennessee followed the cast and his play to out-of-town tryouts, where he and Kazan listened to Tandy’s increasingly strident complaints. “If Brando feels bored or tired, he acts bored or tired. If he feels like a homosexual, he becomes one on stage.”

One night in New Haven, Tennessee watched in horror as Brando played Stanley “as a swish.” Later, Tennessee berated him for his outrageous performance. Tandy also denounced him, defining him as “the most unprofessional actor I’ve ever worked with.”

She complained to both Kazan and Tennessee that, based on his occasional boredom with both the play and his role, Brando was shifting the emphasis of the play almost nightly. As a performer, she never knew what to expect from him. She had good reasons to complain. Once, in New Haven, during her delivery of one of Blanche’s most poignant speeches, the audience snickered. She turned around and, to her horror, caught Brando clownishly puffing away at a cigarette which he had inserted into one of his nostrils.

After she complained that Brando was “destroying the integrity” of
Streetcar
, Tennessee attended a performance. After watching some of Brando’s alterations, Tennessee proclaimed to Tandy that “Marlon is adding a new dimension to
Streetcar
.”

With a growing sense of despair, Tandy endured night after night, living in dread of what Brando might do at that evening’s performance. An acting career loomed in her future, making her wonder if she’d survive opening night playing opposite an actor she called “Broadway’s bad boy.”

Tryouts in New Haven preceded the troupe’s migration to Boston, where Kazan told Tennessee “the blue bloods will object to the raw, animal sex of the play.” But contrary to those predictions,
Streetcar
was well received. The cast continued with its optimistic streak as
Streetcar
opened to rave reviews in Philadelphia.

Kazan also warned Tennessee that the early success of the show “will have New York critics sharpening their knives for us. New York critics didn’t always follow the praise that came ‘from hicks in the boondocks.’ I told the cast in Philadelphia that
Streetcar
could be compared to oysters. ‘Remember,’ I cautioned them, ‘not everybody likes oysters.’”

Kazan exhibited increasing bouts of bizarre behavior before the play’s opening in New York City. Tennessee interpreted his director as “a bit of a homophobe,” as did other members of the cast. But as time went by, the playwright noticed Kazan showing more and more interest in the subject. Tennessee once speculated that he felt that the womanizing Kazan was a closeted homosexual.

“Just show me a womanizer,” he said, “from Errol Flynn to Howard Hughes, on down, and I bet you’ll find a lavender streak in there somewhere.”

One night after a performance, Kazan approached Brando backstage. “I want to know what takes place when two faggots sleep together. I mean, I can picture it in my mind, but I don’t quite get the logistics.”

In response, on a dare, Brando invited Kazan to share a hotel room with him with two beds. “I’ll have a homosexual encounter in my bed, and you can show up with your lady of the evening. We’ll watch you and you can watch us.”

Brando selected a young actor, Sandy Campbell, who just happened to be the lover of Donald Windham, Tennessee’s best friend.

To Brando’s surprise, Kazan showed up with Kim Hunter, whom Brando had already seduced.

Sandy later told Tennessee and his lover, Frank Merlo, “Brando and I put on a great show for them. I wanted to perform my best, throwing more gusto into the sex than I usually did. We really went at it. Earlier, Marlon had suggested that we go at it like two animals in heat, getting into every conceivable position that we could think of. I called it our gymnastic romp. As far as I could tell, Kazan seduced Kim in a rather boring, old-fashioned missionary position.”

Sandy Campbell is the only source of this amazing story. At first his claim might be met with a degree of skepticism, but not after 1988 when Knopf published
Elia Kazan: A Life
, the director’s memoirs. In this autobiography, Kazan admitted that he once extended an invitation to Tennessee for “a double date.” The memoir went on to describe how, while Kazan occupied a twin bed with “a young lady” (name unknown), Kazan watched Tennessee and “a Mexican jungle cat” (a reference to Pancho Rodriguez) make love. Kazan’s critique of Pancho’s lovemaking? “In a word, rambunctious.”

After a year’s run of
Streetcar
on Broadway Kazan could admit that homosexual love “was no longer a mystery to me.”

Author Truman Capote, Brando’s future nemesis, during the rehearsals of
Streetcar
was on his way backstage to search for his friend, Tennessee Williams, who was running late for an agreed-upon luncheon date. As he was to later recall, “I stopped in my tracks when I encountered a young man asleep.”

“It was a winter afternoon,” Truman said. “I found the place deserted except for this brawny young man stretched out atop a table on the stage under the gloomy glare of stage lights. He was sleeping soundly. He wore a white T-shirt and denim trousers that did little to conceal the outline of his genitals. He had a squat gymnasium physique and weightlifter’s arms. It was definitely a Charles Atlas chest but he had a copy of Freud resting on the chest of that perfect body. I took him for a stagehand, one who definitely moonlighted for pay with the queens of Broadway.”

“I looked closely at his face hoping to wake him up gently and perhaps arrange a rendezvous with him later where I would personally audition him,” Truman continued. “It was as if a stranger’s head had been attached to the brawny body, as in certain counterfeit photographs. For this face was so very untough, superimposing, as it did, an almost angelic refinement and gentleness upon hard-jawed good looks: Taut skin, a broad, high forehead, wide-apart eyes, an aquiline nose, full lips with a relaxed, sensual expression.”

“Finally, I realized it was Marlon Brando!” Truman said. “He didn’t have the least suggestion of the unpoetic Stanley Kowalski. It was therefore rather an experience to observe, later that afternoon, with what chameleon ease he acquired the character’s cruel and gaudy colors. Superbly, like a guileful salamander, he slithered into the part. His own
persona
evaporated.”

Truman remembered how Brando, lying on that table, opened only one eye at first to see what stranger had invaded his lair. “He looked at me as if I were green and a four-headed monster who’d just gotten off the ship from Mars,” Truman said. “It was obvious to me that from the first, Marlon was fascinated by me. Perhaps he’d never met anyone like me. I am, after all, unique. Sometimes I have this peculiar effect on men.”

The historic fact that Truman met Brando is true, and the details, as noted above, have been reported in numerous biographies. But the choreography of the meeting that’s outlined above didn’t involve Brando and Truman, but, rather, Brando and Sandy Campbell.

The young actor had told his friend, Truman, about how he’d first met Brando. Truman put a spin on the incident, eliminated Sandy from its context altogether, and substituted himself instead, as he so often did in many other incidents.

In reality, after
Streetcar
had opened on Broadway, Truman was taken backstage by Tennessee and introduced to Brando in a way that was a lot more conventional than in Truman’s more elaborate and romanticized version, as noted above.

From the moment they first met, Truman set about to ingratiate himself with Brando. On one drunken night in Key West, Truman later claimed that, “Tennessee got him first, but I wanted to be next in line. After getting to know Marlon a bit better, I realized to my regret that the line stretched around the block. I had to persevere. I could-n’t let Tennessee have one up on me.”

The opening of
A Streetcar Named Desire
made theatrical history as the curtain went up at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on December 3, 1947. The word had been out there for months that this was going to be “the play” to see that winter. For days in advance, lines had formed around the block, as theater-goers eagerly sought to buy tickets. Scalpers were having a field day, hawking tickets for fifty dollars each.

“Sex sells,” said theater
doyenne
Jean Dalrymple, who was one of the distinguished guests on opening night. She joined a wide array of VIPs that also included a well-dressed Marlon Brando, Sr. and his sober wife, Dodie, as well as Tennessee’s mother, Edwina Dakin Williams, and the playwright’s rather jealous brother, Dakin.

Even David O. Selznick showed up, although Irene had specifically asked him not to. She had suggested that her estranged husband “and your trollop,”—an unkind reference to his mistress, Jennifer Jones—go elsewhere that evening. During the early conceptualization of the production, Selznick had aggressively promoted Jones for the role of Blanche DuBois, casting that was simply unthinkable to Irene.

“We had been told that
Streetcar
was filled with more raw sexual passion than anything that had ever been presented on Broadway,” Dalrymple claimed. “The word was also out on Brando. Gossip had it that after
Streetcar
he was going to be the hottest actor on Broadway.”

“From the moment Brando walked out on the stage, all eyes were riveted on him,” Dalrymple said. “In his sweaty, tight-fitting red T-shirt, and in those even tighter jeans that were very revealing, he was like an animal in heat. It was an exciting moment in the theater.”