Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (57 page)

Sweet Bird
was a kind of road map of this erosion. “It’s the work of an older and more deeply troubled man than the author of ‘Streetcar’—the simple and dreadful fact of the attritions of time can’t be painted out of the picture,” Williams admitted to Brooks Atkinson. “We know them and gauge them in advance—and we double the pressure on ourselves to make up for them,—but can we?”

In May 1958, when Kazan first read and responded to the script of
Sweet Bird of Youth
, he sensed in the play’s intensity and in its eloquence that something had shifted in Williams. “I think the arias are wonderfully done and will be most effective and are an advance on CAT and can be staged more frankly even than those we did in CAT,” he wrote to Williams. He added, “I think the psychoanalysis has done you good and you should go back.” In a typed, five-page exegesis, Kazan told Williams that Chance Wayne had “the potential of being a character as memorable as any you have written . . . a sort of grotesque mid-twentieth century Hamlet.” He added, “Chance smells of doom. It comes out of him like sweat, or like a radiation.” To his set designer, Jo Mielziner, however, Kazan added another dimension to his interpretation. “I think this is the most truly autobiographical play Williams ever wrote,” he confided. “Not in the way MENAGERIE was autobiographic—not a memory, softened and romanticized by time, of his youth, but Tennessee trying to describe his state of soul and state of being today and now.” Kazan went on, “It is the frankest play he has written, dealing as it does with his own corruption and his wish to return to the purity he once had. . . . I believe it is Tennessee himself in disguise, right down to the thinning hair.”

In Chance’s existential quandary—he had broken his own heart—Kazan saw Williams’s sense of shame and self-condemnation, an idea that Molly Day Thacher also raised in her perceptive five-page dissection of the play for her husband: “The play is an expression of a deepening theme of Tennessee’s,” she wrote. “What is coming clearer lately behind the fear is guilt and a sense of doom-that-is-punishment, a waiting for punishment that is like a seeking for it. This is one of the deep things that no one can or should try to touch or tamper with.” In the play, Chance has come back to his hometown to try to reclaim Heavenly, the love of his youth, whose father, Boss Finley, drove him away after their affair. Chance, who doesn’t know that he infected Heavenly with a sexually transmitted disease, is unprepared for the extent of Boss Finley’s rage; twice faced with the threat of castration or murder, he refuses to leave town. Chance’s stuckness—his reluctance to take action to save his own life—constitutes the suspense of Williams’s story. As Thacher spelled it out:

The PLOT of the play is that a man comes to his home town

And is warned to get out of town

And is warned again and we and he see that the threat is serious

And more serious

And he still doesn’t go

And the threat looms bigger

And he’s offered a chance to get out

And the threat gets uglier and realer

And he lets go his

chance to get out

And we see that he wants to be destroyed

And he wakes up to his destruction.

without it turning into a half-play. . . .

. . . . The threat could come from ONE person, be the twisted exaggerated vengeance of one person.

The greater the severity of Boss Finley’s threat, the greater the paradox of Chance’s refusal to save himself. “He is surrounded by murderous forces that want to do away with him or castrate him. . . . He is not strong enough to fight these murderous forces. And perhaps he doesn’t even want to escape,” Kazan told Mielziner, adding, “This is the strangely and unexpectedly puritanical side of Williams. He is obsessed with his own sin, and I suppose it is this sense of guilt that makes his vision universal.”

For Mielziner’s edification, Kazan recalled Williams’s behavior on location in Greenville, Mississippi, during the filming of
Baby Doll
. “There, if ever I saw one, was a trapped man,” Kazan said.

In one obsessive drunken moment he said he hoped he could get out of town alive, and he began to be panic stricken. . . . After three days he disappeared without warning. He had even felt, and I have felt this, trapped in his hotel room. That in case of an emergency or of sudden danger, there was no way out of the hotel room. And, after all, there was only one way out for him. Down through the lobby full of people that knew him and, as he saw it, hated him. You get the idea. It’s all in the play. The scene in the cocktail lounge is exactly this. And, furthermore, I am only treating the matter superficially. He feels the whole world is against him as an artist and as a homosexual both. . . . Sometimes I wonder how the hell he lives! . . . How does Williams get out of this trap? Well, for one thing, which is like CHANCE, increasingly by drink. (His other forms of evasion, Kazan added, included “the act of loving” (although he “complains that as he gets older this is a decreasingly frequent escape for him”) and, greatest of all, the “act of imagination.”)

Kazan felt that the play called for a kind of “subjective scenery,” which would dramatize both the trap that Chance is caught in and the imagination by which he escapes from it—scenery “from which Chance (Tennessee) can transport himself . . . by an act of art or by some extraordinary stimulus.” He continued, “The PROCESS of the play is again and again how CHANCE passes from one world to the other. . . . CHANCE, and THE PRINCESS and even THE BOSS come forward under the author’s direction, and recreate for themselves and for us their wish-dreams, their romanticized pasts, their lost glory. And as this happens, the author, now confident in the capabilities of the new stage says in his stage direction that ‘Room changes.’ ‘Bar disappears.’ ‘They are alone in the Palm Garden.’ ‘He is alone with himself.’ In other words, the TRAPPED ONE is transported on the wings of this spiritual experience—drink, dope, romance, sex, longing, imagination, memory, whatever—OUT OF THIS WORLD.”

KAZAN WAS RIGHT to see a self-portrait in the character of Chance. But in the manipulative cohabitation of Chance and the Princess, Williams was also exploring the dynamics of his symbiotic connection to Merlo. The Princess, in her hysterical collapse, sees Chance, at first, as an agent of salvation. “Chance, you’ve got to help me stop being the monster that I was this morning, and you can do it, can help me,” she tells him. Chance, in turn, latches on to the Princess as a means to the end of getting to Hollywood and redeeming his and Heavenly’s blighted lives. But, in act 3, when Chance places a call to Sally Powers, a gossip columnist in Hollywood—hoping that the Princess will convince her to break the story of his and Heavenly’s talent—the Princess launches into a megalomaniacal aria. Her arpeggios of self-approbation begin to sever her connection to Chance, who, in the course of her speech, is transformed from savior to extra in her epic.

PRINCESS: . . . I seem to be standing in light with everything else dimmed out. He’s in the dimmed out background as if he’d never left the obscurity he was born in. I’ve taken the light again as a crown on my head to which I am suited by something in the cells of my blood and body from the time of my birth. It’s mine, I was born to own it, as he was born to make this phone call for me to Sally Powers, dear faithful custodian of my outlived legend.

When the Princess learns from Powers that her latest movie is a hit—“Grown, did you say? My talent?”—Chance’s needs are immediately erased from her mind. In its ruthlessness, the Princess’s volte-face demonstrates the centrifugal force of fame, the destiny of “me,” never of “we.” Chance is no longer necessary to her. Aglow with a sense of her own importance, the Princess pushes him away with lacerating cruelty. “You’ve just been using me. Using me,” she says, calling him “a beach-boy I picked up for pleasure, distraction from panic.”

The parameters of the tale—the exhausted and demanding diva fearing the demise of her talent, and the beach boy/hustler trying to make meaning of his louche, wasted life—caught at least part of the struggle that bedeviled Williams’s relationship with Merlo. The Princess and Chance need things in each other; they just don’t need each other. “Frank . . . is so pitifully unable to think about anything but himself, especially at times when someone is making an emotional demand on him other than the accustomed one of sex, which he answers with unfailing brilliance always, and for which much is forgiven,” Williams told Wood. “Each of us is an island.”

Geraldine Page and Paul Newman in
Sweet Bird of Youth

At the finale, the Princess is raring to return to Hollywood and to her new celebrity. They sit together on the hotel bed in what the stage directions call “the huddling-together of the lost, but not with sentiment, which is false, but whatever is truthful in the moments when people share doom, face firing squads together.” The Princess asks Chance to come with her. “You’re still young, Chance,” she tells him. “Princess, the age of some people can only be calculated by the level of—level of—rot in them. And by that measure I’m ancient,” he says. Chance balks at the offer of escape. “I’m not part of your luggage,” he says. “What else can you be?” she asks. “Nothing,” Chance replies, “but not part of your luggage.”

Chance is resigned to staying in his hometown—“the home of my heart”—and to facing his destruction. “Something’s got to mean something, don’t it, Princess?” Chance says in one of his last lines. Will he stay or will he go? Chance’s decision, like Williams’s, is to destroy himself for meaning. As Boss Finley’s henchmen lurk on the periphery of the stage, Chance comes downstage at the finale and addresses the audience. “I don’t ask for your pity,” he says in the play’s sensational last lines, “but just for your understanding—not even that—no. Just for your recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all.” In these lines—too poetic and too eloquent for Chance—the character morphs into the playwright.

WITH
SWEET BIRD
completed and the prospect of another production on the horizon, throughout the spring and summer of 1958 Williams began to marshal his troops. In case Kazan turned the project down, he fired off to Wood a list of alternate directors, including José Quintero, Sidney Lumet, Bobby Lewis, and Josh Logan; he suggested the names of film production companies that might take a preproduction “big deal gamble.” Once Kazan showed his hand—he was already fully committed for the fall of 1958, he told Williams, but “if you want to wait for me, I’ll be your boy”—Williams began to worry, somewhat disingenuously, about the director’s steam-rolling energy and his influence over “the most important thing, which is the play’s truth.” “Please help me not to be seduced or distracted by the great Mr. K!” he wrote to Wood, adding, “Hold on to Quintero till we know what Gadg wants, and are sure it’s the truth of this play.”

Kazan’s instincts, as usual, were inspired. Williams had organized his original ending around Heavenly; Kazan insisted that “what happens to Chance” was the question that the audience would want answered and the proper end of the story. Williams began the second act without his main characters on the stage; Kazan found a way of keeping Chance at the center of the drama by having the blaring horns of the Princess’s borrowed Cadillac call “attention to his presence in town and to his new affluence and power,” as he drives around Boss Finley’s home. Williams had planned to use the audience as stand-ins for the attendees at the political meeting hall where Boss Finley’s rally takes place, a device that Kazan found gauche and old-fashioned; he suggested instead having the rally be conjured up by a huge upstage TV screen on which the characters were treated cinematically: “the camera cutting from enormous close-ups of the BOSS’S face to shots of the audience, to shots of the heckler, to shots of Heavenly,” while “CHANCE is placed prominently on our stage watching what seems like a preview of his own fate.”

The “stunt,” as Kazan called this behemoth screen, was a piece of theatrical legerdemain that suggested the dimensions of both Boss Finley’s power and the danger of his racist ideas to the community, while finessing the play’s “obvious weakness”: “The second act had very little relation to what had happened in the first and introduced a whole new set of characters who’d been barely mentioned before.” Nearly all of Kazan’s strategic suggestions—including the need to raise the stakes of Chance’s guilt at the finale, in order to make him submit to a castration—were incorporated into Williams’s final script and became part of his meaning.

Where Kazan was concerned, Williams never let his artistic vanity get in the way of commercial success. “I can’t think of any other director who could touch Kazan, creatively,” he told Wood, who was aghast at the price Kazan was asking for his services. “I am out,” Kazan told Wood, when she balked at his terms. “I don’t really make deals with agents,” he explained to Williams. “The only one who can call a deal off between you and me would be you. You can call it off if you like, or I can call it off to you. But agent-talk is all . . . plumage display, flexing and unflexing of muscles and bullying, bullying bullying!” Their collaboration was golden, and Williams knew it. He told Wood, “I do think he’s probably entitled to a better deal than he’s gotten before in directing my work because, as we all know, this play has a kind of sensationalism which almost obscures its basic seriousness and truth. Blackmail, liquor, dope, an ovariectomy, a woman raping a boy, a crazy southern demagogue, the negro problem, a beating, Etc. Who but Kazan could hold these elements in control and still make dramatic use of them? And who could I work with as well as I can with this old pirate?” Williams added, “Meanwhile, please play it cool with the Greek.” When it came to Kazan and
Sweet Birth of Youth
, Williams was willing to pay, and he got his money’s worth. “I feel that this play needs him more than any other I’ve written,” Williams wrote to Cheryl Crawford, the show’s producer. By contrast, he balked at the exorbitant demands of the show’s male star, Paul Newman. “He mustn’t try to screw me: that I will only take from Kazan,” Williams told Wood.