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) (9 page)

Crawford contacted Wood, who arranged for the playwright to return from Provincetown to meet the actress at “21” for lunch the following week.

Slightly nervous and feeling inadequate, Tennessee arrived at the chic restaurant wearing a black suit borrowed from a Baptist preacher from Kansas City who stayed at the YMCA to cruise young men.

Tennessee wanted to show Crawford great respect, but he’d read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s description of her, and, based on that, he seriously doubted if she could play Myra.

Fitzgerald had written of Crawford’s “monolithic fierceness. She can’t change her emotions in the middle of a scene without going through a sort of Jekyll and Hyde contortion of the face. Also, you can never give her such a stage direction as ‘telling a lie,’ because if you did, she would practically give a representation of Benedict Arnold selling West Point to the British.”

Before meeting Crawford, Tennessee had seen virtually every movie she’d ever made, finding her for the most part tough, gutsy, and fiercely competitive on screen. He suspected she was like that in real life, too.

In later years, he claimed, “I’m glad I met Miss Crawford before her adopted daughter turned her image into a
chiaroscuro
of camp.”

He was referring, of course, to the “lynch biography,”
Mommie Dearest
, penned by her disenchanted adopted daughter, Christina Crawford.

“I liked Joan Crawford,” he later said, “and feared we shared certain things in common—notably a shady background and a tendency to sleep with one man too many. She had worked her way to the top, and I was on my way there, too. She was a rival of such stars as Garbo and Norma Shearer. All of these stars were fading at the box office, and Joan wanted to test her talent on the Broadway stage. She thought my play might do it for her.”

“At 21, Joan knew that her days as a big MGM star were numbered,” Tennessee later claimed. “Beneath the perfect grooming, the expensive clothing, and the glamorous façade lurked a woman who lived in fear. I mean, she’d been born in 1904, or so I’d heard, and it was already 1940. New crops of the young and beautiful were arriving in Hollywood to fuck her longtime beau, Clark Gable.”

“Joan had no trouble with my homosexuality,” Tennessee said. “In Hollywood, she was known as ‘Cranberry’ to the gay set, including the likes of William Haines and director Edmund Goulding.”

“Our luncheon went well until we actually started to talk about her starring in
Battle of Angels,”
he said. “She wanted me to rewrite the play, turning the main character of Val Xavier into a
femme fatale
in a snakeskin jacket.”

“I can see myself arriving in this nothing town and exciting the local men to mayhem and violence,” Crawford said. “My death at the end can come from a posse of jealous women who can’t stand the competition of a real woman.”

Tennessee was prepared to make all sorts of changes to the text of his play, but none this drastic. He had to tell her he couldn’t do it.

“There is a pivotal scene where a painting of Val as Jesus Christ is displayed,” he told her.

“Oh, hell, boy, get me rewrite,” she said. By this time in the course of their luncheon, she was tanked up on vodka. “That’s easy to change. Fuck Christ. Paint me as the embodiment of Mary Magdalene, which would be more interesting than Christ. He’s done to death.”

After their ill-fated sojourn at “21,” he always regretted that he could not have revised his play into a suitable vehicle for her, because he admired her, although knowing she was not a great actress. “On screen, Joan personified both the dreams and disappointments of millions of American women.”

In spite of her hopes, Crawford never got a chance to play a Tennessee Williams character. She felt she would have been ideal cast as Alexandra del Lago in
Sweet Bird of Youth
.

Crawford said that the closest she came to a Williams character was in her role of Eva Phillips in the 1955
Queen Bee
, in which she was cast as an imperious, domineering diva presiding over a dysfunctional family in a Georgia mansion. She told the press, “
Queen Bee
owes so much to Tennessee Williams that we should pay him royalties. I felt like Carte Blanche DuBois.”

Tennessee heard that Tallulah was starring in a play in the town of Dennis on Cape Cod. Since he’d written
Battle of Angels
specifically for her to play Myra, the female lead, he sent her his first draft of the play. After two weeks, when he hadn’t received any word from her, he decided to bicycle to Dennis, a distance of forty miles from Provincetown.

There as part of a summer tour, Tallulah was starring in Arthur W. Pinero’s
The Second Mrs. Tanqueray
, which had had its premiere in London in 1893. She had been cast as Paula Tanqueray, a woman who’d been the mistress of several men. “Type casting,
dah-ling
,” Tallulah had told the press.

Backstage, Tennessee was introduced to Colin Keith-Johnson, a distinguished British actor cast as her long-suffering husband. He was handsome, tall, and blonde, with the physique of an athlete. Only later, Tennessee learned that the married actor was also playing Tallulah’s husband off the stage as well as on it.

Tallulah herself was emerging from her own failed marriage to actor John Emery, who was unfairly called “a John Barrymore clone” by harsh critics.

At this point in his young life, Tennessee was not used to visiting actresses in their dressing rooms, especially an actress as uninhibited as Tallulah. He’d later see the vaginas of such stars as Vivien Leigh and Elizabeth Taylor, but at this point, he blushed when he discovered Tallulah sitting nude in front of her dressing room mirror, making emergency repairs to her face. “As you can plainly see, dahling,” she said to him, “my breasts, contrary to rumor, are not altogether fallen. Come in.”

“It’s an honor to meet the great Tallulah Bankhead,” he said. “I’m Tennessee Williams.”

“I understand you were born in Mississippi,” she said. “As you know, I’m from Alabama. Our Southern culture probably forms a bond between us.”

“I hope so,” he said. “I wrote the role of Myra hoping you could play her on stage. You’d be devastating in the part.”

“You do write with a certain sensitivity,” she said. “Perhaps we’ll work together some day in one of your future plays. But I consider
Battle of Angels
degenerate filth. You must remember this: I am a lady, although not as chaste as Helen Hayes. There is no escaping the fact, young man, that you have written a dirty play.”

Tennessee tried to defend himself in front of such a formidable presence. “I had hoped that you’d see my play as a mixture of super religiosity and hysterical sensuality spinning around the central character of the drifter, Val Xavier. My play is dedicated to D.H. Lawrence, who inspired some of the themes, mixing Freudian motifs with Christian symbolism and Dionysian myth.”

“Oh, please, dahling, all that symbolism is hard to take before I’ve had my first bourbon of the afternoon,” she said. “If you want to write plays, you must learn that on stage, religion and sex do not mix.”

“But I read that you wanted to appear as Sadie Thompson in W. Somerset Maugham’s
Rain,”
he said. “A prostitute deported to the South Seas, who attracts the attentions of a zealous reverend mired in his own lasciviousness.”

“Oh,
dah-ling
, it’s vulgar to speak of one’s past indiscretions,” she said.

There was a knock on her door, a voice announcing himself as Leonard Bernstein.

“Just a minute,” dahling,” she called out. She whispered to Tennessee. “I will not star in your play. I read yesterday that Miriam Hopkins is considering it. We both lost out on the role of Scarlett O’Hara. Maybe she’ll make a comeback as your Myra.”

“In the meantime, I don’t want you to think your bike ride down here was a total waste. I want you to meet this musician, Mr. Bernstein. I had him last night. Perhaps you’ll get lucky tonight.” She turned toward the door, “Come in, Leonard.”

It was Tallulah herself who brought the flamboyant soon-to-be musical giant of the 20
^th
century together with the flamboyant playwright who would both shock, delight, and dazzle audiences in the 1940s and 50s.

As Tallulah had predicted, Leonard Bernstein and Tennessee were intrigued with each other. The composer/conductor invited Tennessee to drive back with him to Tanglewood, where he was the assistant to the great Russian conductor, Serge Koussevitzky.

On the way there, Tennessee learned how Tallulah had met Bernstein. On a hot summer afternoon, she’d seen him in rehearsal, “shimmying” his way through
The Rio Grande
, a composition by Constant Lambert. Because the auditorium was so hot, he’d removed his shirt. Tallulah had been so impressed with his “rippling back muscles” that she invited him to dinner.

Tanglewood was the name of the Tappan Family Estate, a mile southwest of Lenox, a town in the Berkshire mountains of Western Massachusetts. The Tappan family had donated 210 acres of meadowland on the north shore of Lake Mahkeenac to the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Tennessee would record in his journal what Bernstein told him about the young musicians at Tanglewood. “We never sleep, at least not much. We are forever playing music or playing with each other, love and music. Love and music. It’s so exciting to be alive.”

At Tanglewood, Tennessee, to his dismay, found that Bernstein shared a bed in a dormitory with six other conducting students. “Whenever we get lucky, one of us hangs this miniature replica of a harp on the door, which means ‘keep out’ until one of us completes our conquest inside.”

Later, Bernstein put those much admired back muscles to work as he plunged into Tennessee’s much used butt. Tennessee later recalled, “I will always remember his words before he took the dive, ‘A peacock must take his pleasure,’ I heard.”

In time, Bernstein would become notorious for his kissing of both men and women, especially men. Tennessee once commented on his kiss. “It was like an assault by a sort of combination of sandpaper and sea anemones!”

[That quote is sometimes attributed to theatrical director Jonathan Miller.]

Although seemingly dedicated to music, Bernstein shocked Tennessee by telling him, “I would gladly give up music to become a film star.”

[On three different occasions in his future, Bernstein would be signed to star in a Hollywood film, but each of the deals fell through because of lack of funding.]

After Bernstein’s stint at Tanglewood, both Tennessee and Tallulah would be added to his list of A-list seductions. Other names on that list included a young Marlon Brando, composer Aaron Copland, Farley Granger, dancer Harold Lang, Rudolf Nureyev, Jerome Robbins, composer Ned Rorem, and
(surprise!)
Lana Turner.

For the sake of heterosexual appearances, Bernstein in Hollywood had taken Turner out on three highly publicized dates. She later told Ava Gardner, “Bernstein is not that successful with women. He told me he would be more inspired in bed if I had asked Tyrone Power to join us in a
ménage à trois.”

Although Bernstein and Tennessee would soon become disenchanted with each other’s personalities, each remained in awe of the other’s talents.

At the end of World War II, Tennessee campaigned for Bernstein to write the incidental music for the theatrical production of
The Glass Menagerie
.

But by the time they met in Mexico City a few years later, the bloom on their friendship had withered.

Tennessee revealed in his memoirs that in Mexico City, he and Bernstein were invited to a luncheon by a “pair of very effete American queens.” Within those memoirs, he complained about how embarrassed he’d been by the composer’s treatment of their hosts.