Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (63 page)

The incident marked the beginning of their end. For the next year, they lived separately in their Duncan Street house. Merlo found a new friend and a new life. “I’m not any longer his ‘Embraceable You,’ at best, a tolerated guest in my Key West refuge, my place where I fight for survival, my wild beast’s cave, as it were,” Williams wrote to Wood in March 1961, alternately outraged and avuncular. Even as he pushed his loved ones away, Williams was compelled to hold onto them. “I have never stopped loving anyone that I ever loved, and I have loved everyone who was considerate of me and my trouble,” he told Wood. “In one of my plays, I don’t remember which one, somebody says: ‘He liked me and so I loved him.’ Oh, yes, in ‘Suddenly Last Summer’—Catharine speaking to the doctor about her feeling for Sebastian. I was speaking for myself, too. I love anyone who likes me, even if I know it may be illusion.”

With Marion Vaccaro and others on holiday adventure

In April 1961, Williams set off alone for Europe in the company of Marion Vaccaro and her gigolo. “Perhaps I will meet with someone who can stand me—somewhere,” he said. About once a week during his time away from Key West, even after swallowing three Miltowns at night, Williams couldn’t sleep. He reported being overcome by “terrific waves of loneliness [which] sweep into my single room.” When he counted up “the dreadful facts of my life,” Merlo was high on his list. “I gave my love, so much of it that there was hardly enough feeling left for friendship, to someone who seems to hate me,” he said. Nonetheless, he couldn’t resist trying to call Merlo. The overseas operator got through, but, as Williams explained to Wood, “the answering party said that he didn’t know me. I said, never mind let me speak to this person. I waited a while and the operator called back, and said, The person doesn’t want to speak to you and I can’t force him.—Then he said to me: Why don’t you get off that streetcar named desire?—I said: I know what you mean, get off it and lie on the tracks.”

“I suppose he is so revolted by my sickness, my state of mind which I think is close to lunacy, that he will take no more of it, and I mustn’t ask for it,” Williams wrote melodramatically to Bob MacGregor, his editor at New Directions, adding of the upcoming production of
Iguana
, “I doubt that Frank will be with me, he doesn’t answer my letters or even the phone.”

In May, from Rome, Williams tried phoning Merlo again, only to be stung once again by his ex-lover’s tormenting refusal to speak to him. Sometimes Williams tried to joke about the telephonic stonewalling and Merlo’s refusal to recognize his name (“Sic Transit Gloria Swanson”); inevitably, bitterness percolated through the posture of nonchalance. “I’ve always tried to respect his pride but now I think he is confusing it with cruelty of a frightening nature, and that he wants to break all pride in me, which I mustn’t permit, for then I would turn to a worm, which is worse than having turned to a bit of a monster,” Williams confessed to Wood. He went on, “Why do I still care about him? He gave me an escape from loneliness, which I think is the worst affliction in life, and he gave me a sense of life all these years when I’ve been so inclined to think too much about death.” “Magnani says, ‘Fuck it,’ ” Williams reported in a joint letter to Bowden and Corsaro in mid-May. “But I still hold the torch for ‘The Horse.’ And I long for the peace of my little house there, to help me get through one more Broadway production.”

Merlo’s silence cast a long shadow over Williams’s travels, and also over the rewriting of
Iguana
. In their life together, Williams had been the engine and Merlo the caboose. Now, for both parties, the ride was over. So it was for Shannon. The argument with Merlo became the argument of the play.

Dispossessed of his keys, his tour bus, his job, and his confidence, Shannon is hounded into frantic retreat. Facing off against Miss Fellowes, the infuriated leader of his tour group’s insurrection, Shannon repeats almost verbatim Williams’s words to Wood about Merlo: “Don’t! Break!
Human! Pride!
” he says. At the end of the play, Hannah faces the prospect of continuing on alone without her beloved Nonno. “I think of a home as being a thing that two people have between them in which each can . . . well, nest—rest—live in, emotionally speaking,” she says. “How will it seem to be traveling alone after so many years of traveling with

. . . ,” Shannon asks Hannah, who replies, “I will know how it feels when I feel it.” “I wonder . . . if we couldn’t
travel
together, I mean just
travel
together,” Shannon suggests. Hannah demurs. “Don’t kid yourself that you ever travel with someone,” she says. “You have always traveled alone except for your spook, as you call it. He’s your traveling companion. Nothing, nobody else has traveled with you.”

Like an amalgam of his characters, Williams felt at once incensed and unmoored. “The Horse has done just about all in his power to shatter me and humiliate me, so I must find the courage to forget and put away a sick thing,” he wrote to St. Just in the summer of 1961. “To be fair, it isn’t easy to live thirteen years with a character walking a tight rope, and a thin one, over lunacy. But the time has come to ‘cool it’ and I trust I can.”

ON JANUARY 8, 1961, six days after Williams officially called it quits with Merlo, he also cut loose his producer, Cheryl Crawford, who had mounted four of his plays and had told him, after seeing an Actors Studio workshop of
Iguana
in May 1960, “In Iguana you can have your finest play to date and a play, stealing movie slogans, I would be proud to present.” Williams had asked Crawford for notes; she gave them. “During the intermission I want an audience to be saying ‘What’s going to happen next?’ ‘
What
is he (or she) going to do?’ They weren’t,” she wrote, adding, “The audience simply does not know who or what to follow by the end of Act Two. Consequently, they were not identifying and not caring.”

Although Crawford had correctly identified a problem—which Williams would elegantly solve in his final version—she didn’t hear from him for six months. His letter of January 8 informed her that Charles Bowden would be his producer. “This play is a dramatic poem of the most intensely personal nature and Bowden, for some unknown reason, seemed to want it like that,” Williams wrote. Once again, in a sensational bit of backpedaling, Williams imposed on his own bad faith the posture of reasonableness. “I never thought that you really wanted ‘Iguana’; I thought that, being a truly kind person, you wanted to encourage me by seeming to want it, just that, and when I got your notes, I realized I couldn’t please you with it and still please myself,” he explained, adding defensively, “I think you need this play like a hole in the head. Surely you know that, don’t you?” Having declared
Iguana
his “probably last play,” in the next paragraph Williams wrote, “I hope and trust and pray that one of the [plays] I am holding in reserve will be a right one for you.” His careless kiss-off was signed, “My heart’s true love to you, darling!” Their collaboration was over.

The Night of the Iguana
would make its way to Broadway with Williams now cast as the seasoned captain of a new team. “I want to be around for the staging of this one,” Williams told Bowden. “Corsaro would need me and want me, since the play is such a highly personal play, dealing with emotional things that only a man of my history (and age) has experienced enough to understand them, totally.” To Williams, the Harvard-educated Bowden, an actor-turned-stage-manager-and-producer, was “a terrifically dynamic man”; to Corsaro, however, Bowden was “silly putty—a silly person who had a coterie of people around him right out of a Tennessee Williams waxworks” and who “almost wrecked the play.” While teaching them how to cope with his own wayward style of living and writing, the befogged playwright struggled to hold these incompatible elements of himself together.

In order to free himself from inhibition and test out dramatic possibilities, when he worked on a play Williams would often forget the logic of his plot and fill in scenes without necessarily picking up where he’d left off the day before. “My scripts at this stage are a shambles of inconsistencies, repeats, contradictions, because of my methodless method of work, my not reading over yesterday’s work, just going on, on, like a madman, spooked chased by a spook,” he explained to Chuck Bowden. From this crazy quilt of reimagined strands, the play was finally assembled: an act of collage as much as construction. “The revisions extended certain areas and, in some ways, they overwhelmed others,” Corsaro recalled of the daunting task of pulling together Williams’s eloquent mess. He remembered Williams handing him three versions of a scene in the third act in which Shannon tells Hannah about him and his tour group spotting some natives consuming “undigested” scraps from a dung hill. “I said, ‘What do I do with them?’ ‘I want you to see what you think is right, or whether any of them are right.’ I said, ‘You’re giving me a big responsibility, Mr. Williams,’ ” Corsaro recalled.

In the old days, Williams had relied on Kazan to bushwhack through his tangle of scenes, to winkle out his strongest themes, and to take the lead in their dramatic rearrangement. Now, to his rookie collaborator, Williams had to be both coach and cheerleader. “Despite your talent, your sensibility, your understanding, you seem to be distrustful of your ability to solve dramaturgic problems which are surely not as challenging as the ones you bravely confronted in such fearfully challenging works as ‘Oh, Dad’ and ‘Short Happy Life,’ ” Williams wrote to Corsaro. “Let us stick, in our personal relations as a company of artists, to a thing which the play has to say, that it is possible and surely most desirable for desperate living creatures to make up for the deficiencies in the world’s creation: to play a compassionate and understanding deity as if we were under-studies or stand-bys for our mysterious creator who behaves as if he had flown to another part of the universe and had forgotten ours.” Williams added, “(Rah-Rah, yeah, Team, Etc.)”

For the show to move from the Coconut Grove to Broadway, it needed to have a star. Williams set his cap at Katharine Hepburn, whose “aristocracy of spirit”—her combination of backbone and cool—made her a perfect fit for Hannah Jelkes. “I wrote the part of Hannah for Hepburn and I still can’t see anyone else playing it with that odd combination of astringency and lyrical feeling that Katie could give it, not even Page, unless she were staged by Kazan,” he said. “For Katie, I might even find a way to eliminate the dung-hill speech at the end, although I think it makes the strongest statement in the play about what Shannon is showing his ladies:—‘the horrors of God’s world’ as it exists without His intervention.”

When Williams called Hepburn that January, her immediate response was “absolutely impossible.” “You say ‘absolutely impossible,’ and I know you mean it right now but, being an incurable romanticist, I think that nothing is absolutely impossible when it is right as you and Hannah Jelkes, since I have never written a part so perfectly right for an actress as Hannah is for Kate Hepburn, at least not deliberately,” Williams wrote to her the next day. He added, “Someday, somehow, it
will
happen.”

“You’re a hustler, aren’t you, you’re a fantastic cool hustler,” Shannon says to Jelkes, who answers, “Yes, like
you
, Mr. Shannon.” In the confidence game, Williams himself was no slouch. In the unctuous last paragraph of what he called his “pitch” to Hepburn, he played his wild card. Their discussion the previous evening had included talk about the film version of
Suddenly Last Summer
, in which Hepburn played Mrs. Venable and which Williams considered “an abortion.” Now he reminded Hepburn of how, on the last day of shooting, after her final take, she spat on the sound stage to show her contempt for the director, Joseph Mankiewicz. “I don’t mean to put down [Montgomery] Clift and Liz [Taylor] or anybody connected, really, but you, only you, resisted the misconception,” Williams wrote. “How awful it must have been for you to play that last bit! If it isn’t too late, I would like to make it up to you.” In the end, Bowden’s shuttle diplomacy, Williams’s flim-flam (“Yes, I know, I’m coming on like a huckster, like a cool hustler”), and the script itself captured Hepburn’s imagination. “Bit by bit, we are going to go on submitting bits of this play written for you till the voice of Hannah says, ‘Yes, you win, I’ll do it,’ ” Williams wrote in his emboldened next letter.

Hepburn saw that she was right for the part and that she could be great in it; she had already begun to imagine her way into Hannah. She agreed to talk contract. “You must understand something! I love this work! I’m ninety-five per cent of the way home with Hannah in the dressing room!” she told Bowden, as they drove through the Hollywood Hills trying to finalize a deal. Bowden insisted that he needed more than a six-month contract. “Not a moment more!” Hepburn said. For Bowden, this was a deal-breaker. “She won’t give us more time because [Spencer] Tracy is in a bad way again, and she feels she is the only one who can save him,” he explained to Williams. So Hepburn gave up the role of Hannah onstage to play it offstage, and Margaret Leighton, the ethereal thirty-nine-year-old British actress, was signed for the part—for which she would win the 1962 Tony Award for Best Actress.