Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (61 page)

To beg a question

Of the year’s quartet:

Winter, wolverine,

Is present—

Never past.

Elusive summer, rare,

Improvises—

Thinks it is

A tree,

A blade of grass,

A pollinating bee;

While cold snakes

Court

July’s warm air

Under warmed rocks,

And thrill,

With coldly coursing blood,

Thermal stone

That happened to be there.

Think hard

On seasons flying fast.

If Williams’s personal life was held in a precarious balance, his professional one had already begun to unravel. On April 21, 1960, Kazan, “looking rather shaky and gray in the face,” according to Williams, met for a drink and told him that he was quitting as the director of
Period of Adjustment
—a seismic blow that ended the most important theatrical collaboration of twentieth-century American theater.

After the success of
Sweet Bird
, Kazan had told Williams that he would direct anything he wrote, “sight unseen and unread.” The Broadway theater had been booked. The producing triumvirate of Kazan, Crawford, and Mielziner had been assembled. Kazan’s surprise announcement pole-axed Williams. “I tried my best to make him change his mind, but he was adamant,” Williams told the
New York Times
.

Williams’s fury was compounded by the fact that Kazan was leaving the play in order to direct a film project by Williams’s friend and theatrical rival William Inge (
Splendor in the Grass
), which Kazan said Williams took as a “signal that I preferred working with Inge.” Williams was openly jealous, even sometimes bitchy about Inge, who’d had three hits in a row, including
Bus Stop
and
Picnic
. (Inge owed the launching of his career to Williams, who had befriended him in 1944 during the pre-opening run of
The Glass Menagerie
in Chicago, when Inge had interviewed him for the
St. Louis
Star-Times.
Back then, Inge was trying and failing to write plays in the manner of Noël Coward. Contemplating the way that Williams converted the raw material of his life into drama, he saw a way forward. “Tennessee had shown me a dynamic example of the connection between art and life,” Inge wrote in his diary. “I had never known where to look for material. . . . Now I knew where to look for a play—inside myself.” The result was
Farther Off from Heaven
, a play based on his family; Williams liked the script and got it to Wood, who took Inge on as a client. The rest was Broadway history.) “I did promise to do your play,” Kazan told Williams. “I did because I wanted to do it, and I wanted to do it because I think it’s a beautiful play and a deep one. At that time I intended to get out of the Inge movie. . . . I couldn’t . . . because I had initiated the project. I had made him write it. . . . How the hell can you pull out of a project that has cost a writer that much work and thought? . . . I couldn’t. I didn’t.”

In the evening, after their drink, Williams called Kazan and, in a drunken paranoid outburst, berated him for his betrayal. “I’m furious at the way you spoke to me on the phone,” Kazan wrote to him the next day. “You haven’t a right in the world to infer that I’m lying to you. I have never lied to you. And have I ever asked you to crawl? Has our relationship ever dealt in pity? We have a clean relationship and I did my share to keep it clean.” He added, “I knew you were bound to think that I didn’t really like your play. I expected that, but I didn’t expect the insults.”

With William Inge, friend and rival

Just a year before, Williams had described Kazan as “a very charged man. He is capable of error, and it has happened, but when he is right, he is blinding right.” In this disagreement, the ugliest ever between them, Kazan was blindingly right. “Frankly, it appears to me that the loyalties in our relationship have run more from me to you than the other way,” he said, and spelled it out:

I stuck onto

through the thick and thin of your indifferences and disappearing. . . . I stuck with

when you thought it was crap. I insisted on Gerry Page when you thought she was wrong. And I have taken for four years a whole campaign of vilification in the press to the effect that I was distorting your work. . . . I thought many times I should quit

. But never seriously because I have always put you first. Then came Cassidy’s piece, and I began to think. It isn’t that I care what she thinks. I truly don’t. . . . I only cared that YOU were silent. And I was forced to think that really and truly you felt the same way.

In her review of
Sweet Bird
in the
Chicago Tribune
, the theater critic Claudia Cassidy had tarred Kazan with a now familiar canard, that his vulgar influence marred Williams’s poetic integrity: “The first and in part third are authentic Williams, while the inferior second act is shoddy compromise. Compromise with himself? With his director? Perhaps some of both.” The play, she wrote, was “split down the middle by the same opposing forces that ripped ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’—the antithetical theatrical convictions of the playwright and of the dominant director, Elia Kazan. The valid pressure on Williams’ characters comes from within. . . . Kazan’s pressure often bears down from the outside, crushing the victim like a contracting cage. Compared with the inner violence of a Williams play the outer fringes of superimposed fury can be anti-climactic, even cheap.”

Williams’s past weasel words—referring to the Broadway third act of
Cat
as “prostitution” and “Kazan’s ending”—had fanned the flames of misconception and inevitably trivialized Kazan’s subtle contributions to his work. In fact, Kazan’s psychological and structural acumen provided Williams with a safety net that rallied him out of his writing blocks, challenged his melodramatic excesses, chivied him to work for greater depth, and allowed his imagination to soar. But Williams’s artistic vanity would never allow him to acknowledge to the public or to himself just how much Kazan’s prowess had affected his work. The art belonged to Williams; the inadequacies belonged to someone else. When it came to the critics’ cavils about Kazan, Williams’s silence was deafening. “I was surprised to find that they all had gotten under my skin,” Kazan wrote of these accusations, adding that Cassidy’s
Sweet Bird
notice was “the last bit of water that flushes the bowl.” Now, in the face of Kazan’s withdrawal, Williams told the
Times
, “The charge that Kazan has forced me to rewrite my plays is ridiculous. . . . Kazan simply tried to interpret, honestly, what I have to say.” He went on, “The fact is, Kazan has been falsely blamed for my own desire for success.” “He should have said that earlier,” Kazan countered in the same article.

As it turned out, Williams’s passion for success was the tipping point in Kazan’s decision to say good-bye to him and to Broadway. (
Sweet Bird of Youth
was his last Broadway production.) He wrote to Williams:

I thought, Why does he want me to direct his plays? The answer: Because of some superstition that I bring commercial success. Which you terrifyingly want. But that is part of the same distasteful picture. Just as I can’t help but think you agree with Cassidy, I also think that you think of me as the person who can make your plays “go” and that you are willing to make some sacrifice in integrity and personal values to get the commercial success which I bring you. Well, Tennessee, fuck that! That is a hell of a humiliating position, and I don’t want any goddamn part of it. . . . I’m not going to break my neck, slough off Inge’s movie, do a half-ass job on

only to be told in time, again, that I had misdirected your play into a hit. And then, to wait and wait for you to say something and wait for nothing. What the hell kind of position is that for a man? It’s not for me. . . . Get a new boy and a new relationship.

For more than a decade Kazan had been the premiere American director of stage
and
screen; by 1960, however, he had grown weary of being handmaiden to other people’s talent. “I wanted to be the unchallenged source,” he wrote in his autobiography. His crack at the screenplay for
Wild River
had piqued his interest in his own self-expression; it was further buoyed by the script he had fashioned from Inge’s prose treatment for
Splendor in the Grass
, which ultimately earned Inge the Academy Award for Best Screenplay. Walking away from Williams signaled a strategic volte-face in Kazan’s psyche, as well as his career. He was walking away from commercial theater, from the studios, from his life as an interpretive artist. In time, he would become a best-selling novelist. “I no longer gave a damn about the themes of other men,” he wrote in his autobiography. “How good it felt, despite the cold wind of Tennessee’s disappointment, to be free.” “Something has happened to me, no doubt,” he told Williams after things had calmed down. “And is that bad? I don’t think so. Something in me knows shock is necessary. Abrupt, jolting derailment. I’m sorry it all happened on your play.”

Kazan “vowed not to look back.” But how was Williams to look forward? To the
Times
, he insisted that for his future work there were other directors, in particular José Quintero, who was “just as brilliant as Kazan.” Behind the scenes, after he’d cooled down, he returned, cap in hand, to Kazan. “I want you back if there is any way to get you back for this play,” he wrote to him. “I’m confident that you are sincere about liking the play, and that this little play is one that you could give dignity and depth to, as well as a touching humor.” He went on, “I said I wouldn’t come creeping and crawling and I don’t think I am. I am only telling you that I am still your mystified friend, and will remain so whatever your response to this appeal is. Yes, it is an appeal because I do want you and need you for the play and, without a sob, I don’t think I am in any condition to have it without you. I’d rather put it away.” Williams’s pleading letter was signed “love,” as Kazan’s pugnacious one had been. “Please stay with me in spirit,” he asked Kazan.

Kazan did. “I think our friendship will survive this and I think we will work together again. We’re too close,” Kazan told him in another letter, adding, “I can understand why you’re sore at me. After all I said repeatedly I’d do it, and I was doing it, and then suddenly—. Well, I anticipated how you’d feel. And I think, all considered, you behaved very well. . . . I do think an awful lot of you, value you a lot, more than you know.”

At the time of their split, neither Kazan nor Williams knew how long their creative separation would last: it turned out to be forever. With the frankness that characterized their collaboration, Williams finally accepted the situation as blood under the bridge. “I don’t know, and I will never know, why you decided not to do the play,” Williams wrote Kazan some months after the break. “The message is that you made a big mistake and I suffered a big loss.” Williams continued:

Our association, personally and professionally, has always been a special one. Despite the fact that we had so much in common, but probably it’s the old story of conflicting egos of equally unsure people making a resentment and jealousy where there should have been faith and understanding and the brave use of peculiarly complementary talents for theatre, a mutual daring and a digging of each other’s sense of life.

We’re both full of hate and love, but let’s try not to hurt each other out of fear.

Don’t try to like me now. My psychic sickness and tensions, failure of analysis, self-facing and so forth, have made me at least temporarily impossible to like.

You are in the same boat, I would say, right now, although you have the comfort of a home-life, your devoted children, etc., while I must make out with two dogs and a Parrott and someone I love who is in a relation with me that may make a truly reciprocal love a psychological impossibility.

We are full of fear but also full of courage, and let’s concentrate on the latter, and what does it finally matter whether we do more than understand each other’s dilemma.

Williams remained true to Kazan in his fashion. When, in 1961, a year after the walkout, during rehearsals for
The Night of the Iguana
, Williams’s then director, Frank Corsaro, said in passing, “We young directors want to get away from Kazan,” Williams chimed in, “Not too
far
away, baby, until you young directors are sure as hell that you’re better.”

Although the trajectories of their careers would take them in different directions, Williams and Kazan never lost their fraternal bond. They would continue to correspond, to seek each other’s advice, to give notes on each other’s scripts, and to support each other in moments of personal tragedy. At the beginning of rehearsals for
Period of Adjustment
, Kazan sent Williams a letter of good wishes and enclosed a turkey feather. “You monster,” Williams joked in return, adding, “I wish I had an angel’s feather to enclose in this letter to you but all my feathers are gray ones.”