After that, I went to Italy with Frankie and for the first, no, the second time of prolonged duration, I was unable to write.
Strong coffee no longer sufficed to get the creative juices to flow.
For several weeks I endured this creative sterility, then I started to wash down a Seconal with a martini. And then I was “hooked” on that practice. That summer of 1955 in Rome this creative state of abandonment resulted in the film Baby Doll, the script of which has a wanton hilarity to it, in my opinion, a quality which was never fully or rightly used in the film.
It may seem as if I am blaming Kazan for the beginning of my disasters as a drugged writer. I have never blamed anyone for anything but deliberate cruelty, for there has always been in me the conviction of Blanche, that “deliberate cruelty is the one unforgivable thing.”
Perhaps I do blame Audrey for her neglect, in the dreadful sixties, but even her I blame little. Kazan I blame not at all, not even for his question in a rented limousine—returning from a sad evening at Jane and Tony Smith’s—“Tennessee, how long do you think you are going to live?”
I felt no shock at the brutality of the question, having been long cognizant of the fact that an element of the fire cat must exist in all artists.
“A few months more, Gadg,” I answered him quietly.
For a few minutes no one spoke in the rented limousine returning us from South Orange.
I suppose we all realized that a moment of truth had occurred.
It was through Cat that I met Faulkner. He was in love with Jean Stein, who was working with Cat, and he had come up to Philadelphia when we were there working on Cat, and I had gotten to know him there. He never talked to me. I thought he disapproved of me. And then later that summer he was with Jean Stein again in Paris and we all went to dinner together. I felt a terrible torment in the man. He always kept his eyes down. We tried to carry on a conversation but he would never participate. Finally, he lifted his eyes once in response to a direct question from me, and the look in his eyes was so terrible, so sad, that I began to cry.
Jane Bowles, though, is in my mind the greatest writer. Of course, I’m not a critic, but I am a writer and I think writers make good critics, especially if they divorce themselves from rivalry as I do now. I consider her quite the greatest writer of our century in the English language. And Harold Pinter told me he thought so, too.
Have I yet told you about the evening when my friend “the Professor” and I went to see a work called The Dirtiest Show in Town?
Afterward, we strolled along a street in the East Village. We were almost alongside someone who seemed indigenous to the locale when I recognized him as my dear friend Kazan.
91. Lois Smith and Cliff Robertson in Orpheus Descending.
92. The incredible Laurette Taylor, in The Glass Menagerie on Broadway in 1945. She died a year later.
93. Julie Haydon as Laura in the original Broadway version of The Glass Menagerie, 1946.
94. Laurette Taylor, with Eddie Dowling as Tom, in Menagerie.
95. The awful film version of Menagerie—the most unfortunate film ever made of my work, mostly because of the alterations made at the end to make it “happy.” With Kirk Douglas as “The Gentleman Caller,” Gertrude Lawrence as the mother and Arthur Kennedy as Tom. Gertrude Lawrence deserved better, as did the play.
96. Windham and me at rehearsal of You Touched Me!
97. With Thornton Wilder, Donald Windham at rehearsal of You Touched Me!
98. With Frank Merlo and Charles Feldman at the time of the Streetcar film preparations.
99. What sometimes happens to ladies who always depend on the kindness of strangers—the closing scene of Streetcar, the Broadway production with Kim Hunter, Jessica Tandy, Marlon Brando.
100. An anniversary party of Streetcar (l. to r.: Elia Kazan, Jessica Tandy, Tom, Irene Selznick, Karl Maiden, Kim Hunter).
101. Jessica Tandy as Blanche DuBois, in a mad scene near the end of Streetcar.
102. Vivien Leigh as Blanche, and Brando as Stanley Kowalski—marvelous performances in a great movie, only slightly marred by Hollywood ending.
103. Rosemary Harris, who revived Blanche brilliantly, under Ellis Rabb’s direction.
104. Margaret Phillips, a fine actress given too little direction in the original New York production of Summer and Smoke.
105. With my friend and representative, Mr. Bill Barnes.
The good Professor was, at this moment, engaged in conversation with a black stud and I was somewhat distracted by my apprehension that he was about to get himself into serious trouble.
Precisely what preceded this remark of Kazan I don’t recall, but the remark was:
“Tenn, each of us dies and each of us dies alone.”
I said to him, “Gadg, I know very well that each of us dies but I don’t think we all die alone.”
His response was an introspective, faraway look. At this point I turned my attention to the Professor and somehow, quite atypically, managed to disengage him from his perilous flirtation on that Bowery sidewalk with the towering black.
Since that summer of 1955 I have written usually under artificial stimulants, aside from the true stimulant of my deep-rooted need to continue to write.
I could cross the room to a big bag containing my collected works—as collected and published this year by New Directions—and provide you with the list of plays I have written since that summer and I think it would make you wonder a bit at my ability to continue my work under these debauched conditions.
Of course I could cite a number of known artists, I mean writing ones, who also succumbed to artificial stimulants. I could mention Faulkner’s practice of climbing into the loft of a barn on his Mississippi farm with a full bottle of bourbon when he was intending to write, which I assume was each morning. And I could cite Coleridge and I could mention Jean Cocteau, all of whose best writing was done under opium, I have heard on good authority.
I could mention many productive and honest writers who went the way of liquor, especially in middle years.
Yet I would, of course, not advise any young writer to elect that way until it is forced upon him, until he cannot continue his work without resorting to stimulants.
Not long ago, in fact just a few nights ago, a gifted and handsome young screen writer, seeing me to bed and my bedtime Nembutal, confessed to me that he was able, now, only to write when drinking
I felt like an older brother, and I said, “You’re too young for that, don’t take that way yet.”
He did not seem to think that there would be offered him another and his handsome face was already beginning to show the coarsening effect of excessive drink.
Is it fair not to offer to writers the same tax-exemption for depleted resources that is offered, for instance, to big oil millionaires and steel works and other corporate enterprises which own and run our country?
We are now into protest and politics.
Plays have usually happened on lovely mornings in my Key West studio, though they have happened also on all mornings wherever I may be, even in that N.Y. pad of mine called the Victorian Suite; it has served me well enough, and so have rooms at the Hotel Colón in Barcelona and although I never felt I was able to write well in my various Roman apartments, there is evidence that I sometimes did write well enough, as in the case of Rose Tattoo and The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone.
But surely always the best was in the studio of Key West, and for a couple of weeks late this fall or early in the winter, I hope to return there, to work on a second draft of a new play.
In 1959, I met with a truly shattering setback with the failure of Orpheus Descending—the legitimate descendant of my first New York-managed play, Battle of Angels.
Alas, Orpheus was not only overwritten but it was under-directed by that dear man and fine critic, Harold Clurman.
In the part of Val had been fatally miscast a young man who came on like a lieutenant of the Mafia, which was not at all right for Val. I refused
to fire him in Philadelphia, I told Clurman he’d have to do it, and Clurman did it, and the poor kid came to my suite at the Warwick in tears, not angry at me but professing great love for the play and—well, I was a sympathetic and rather deeply moved audience but I stood firm. “You’re just not right for it, baby. You’ve got a great future but you’re miscast in this one.”
He never got angry at me, not even when it became apparent to him that I was not going to give an inch, let alone the proper male lead for Orpheus.
Then Cliff Robertson came into the play and I remember his first matinée, the best performance of Orpheus, and I remember how that gentleman of the theatre, Robert Whitehead, during this great matinée in Philly, came up and crouched alongside my aisle seat and exclaimed with great emotion, “Oh, this is it, this it is, thank God this is it!”
Well, unfortunately Bob Whitehead was mistaken in aces and spades. This was not it at all: except that single matinée.
The play was overloaded, and the requirements upon Maureen and Clurman were excessive.
But the reviewers could have seen its passages of lyric eloquence and permitted themselves to give the play a break. This they chose not to do. It is remarkable, considering the reviews, that the play survived the two or three months it did. In repertory it ran for seven years in Russia, if that means anything, and I suppose it does.
In New York they put it down with a vengeance, and with a vengeance that shattered me and sent me to Dr. Lawrence Kubie—that, too, was a case of miscasting—for the mistake of strict Freudian analysis. He taught me much about my true nature but he offered me no solution except to break with Merlo, a thing that was quite obviously untenable as a consideration, my life being built around him.
And why did the critics turn on me so fiercely in the late fifties and the early sixties? I suspect it was a cabal to cut me down to what they thought was my size.
And what is my size? It is, I trust, the size of an artist who has consistently given all that he has to give to his work, with a most peculiar passion.
Never mind the bit of egomania now rearing its ugly head. Truth is in that, too … isn’t egomania almost the precondition of all creative work? I have found little to dispell that notion …
And yet through this egomania of an artist there runs the great longing to “reach out your arms and embrace the whole world.” Of course that sentence betrays egomania, too.
Truth is the bird we hope to catch in “this thing,” and it can be better approached through my life story than an account of my career. Jesus, career, it’s never been that to me, it has just been “doing my thing” with a fury to do it the best that I am able.
It is the evening of the first reading of Kazan’s production of Sweet Bird of Youth, a major production by all customary signs: Cheryl Crawford is presenting it, starring Paul Newman and Geraldine Page; such top-ranking actors as Madeleine Sherwood, Rip Torn, and the late Sidney Blackmer are in supporting roles and we are booked into that great barn, the Martin Beck. And there also is probably a big preproduction movie deal.
The reading begins.
About halfway through it I leap from my chair and cry out, “Stop it, stop it! It can’t go on, it’s too awful!”
A total hush descends upon the rehearsal hall as I stride deliriously out into Times Square. I go home and knock myself out with booze and a pill. The phone is ignored if it rings. “The Horse” has left the apartment, going serenely about the mysterious business of Horses who have ridden out many tempests in their young lives …
Evening comes in due course. Then there is a strong knock at the door: the sort of knock that says, Open up in the name of the law!
I open up and there stand Molly and Gadg Kazan, sweetly and genially smiling as if nothing has happened of an unusual nature.
I believe it is near Christmas and a Christmas tree is lighted in the corner and they sit cozily by it.
I am now dreadfully ashamed of my conduct before the company but not yet swerved from my conviction that the play should not go on.
Gadg and Molly talk to me as you do to a wounded animal or a sick child. Gradually my desperate resolve crumbles: I love them. I decide to trust them.
But at the next day’s rehearsal, Kazan, for the first time, does not want me seated directly beside him. Beside him, in fact, is a young writer, and I paranoiacally suspect that he has been brought in to rewrite my work. I sit gloomily back against the wall: the reading of the script is tedious and lifeless and hardly, to my ears, more a presentable script than it had seemed at the previous day’s first reading. But I hold my peace. At lunch break I am introduced to the young writer. It seems that he has been dispatched from the Actors’ Studio as a “listener” to the production and I am now reassured that he will not touch my script, awful though it may be, but I am still jealous of his proximity to Gadg.
Gradually, as rehearsals proceed, he fades out of the picture for me and I am sitting in my rightful place next to our great white father Kazan.
This anecdote is merely inserted here to show once again the state of nerves, the panic, the long, long slide toward a crack-up that stretched appallingly before me, even that long ago.
It occurs to me at this point that I have omitted an account of one of my more prestigious “adventures in drama,” a pair of short plays that were presented under the title of Garden District. The first was a tragicomic one-act titled Something Unspoken; the second was the more important work called Suddenly Last Summer. I believe this production was the first that I went into after the disaster of Orpheus Descending and my subsequent term of Freudian analysis. The summer before its production I had happened to visit Southampton, where that gifted and amusing director Herbert Machiz was vacationing. In a tentative fashion I was working on Suddenly Last Summer. One evening I showed it to Machiz and he was instantly enthralled. He immediately set the wheels of the production in motion by interesting John C. Wilson in the work. For the leading role of Catharine Holly he had the inspired thought of Anne Meacham.
Machiz may not be a master director but he is a ball of fire at getting things going, he has an élan vital, and the greatly supportive companionship of John Myers, the art dealer.
Things went full steam ahead. We obtained one of the first important Off-Broadway houses, the York, on the upper East Side, and after the all-important casting of Anne Meacham, we procured the extremely talented services of Hortense Alden (formerly married to James T. Farrell) as a supporting star in both of the two plays, which were plausibly connected by having the same background of the garden district of New Orleans.
The opening night was a stunner. Miss Meacham tore into her role like a tigress: Hortense Alden was perfect as Mrs. Venable, and as the young doctor, Robert Lansing was an attractive and commanding performer.
The curtain went down to an ovation on opening night. After the audience had filed out, exclaiming with astonishment, a small group remained down front and among them was Elia Kazan.
In those days I had the unfortunate practice of fortifying myself, morally, for an opening night with a barbiturate washed down by several stiff drinks.
I therefore had the courage to go right up to Mr. and Mrs. Kazan and their companions and holler out, “Well, how did you like it?”
Their response was ambiguous: however, they did accompany Frankie and me to our apartment to watch us sweat out the notices. As usual the TV notices came in first, and as usual they were disparaging. I flew into my usual opening night hysteria. I remember saying, “If the theatre doesn’t need me, I don’t need it!”—and various other wild assertions of ego at bay.
Then all at once the Times and the Trib notices came in and they were raves.
While still on the subject of Garden District, I should mention that Anne Meacham was followed by Olive Deering in the part of Catharine. Olive took it to the Coast, where the notices were great, especially for dear little Olive. And I should mention that my foredoomed friend, Diana Barrymore, made a great personal success
of the work in Chicago, with Cathleen Nesbitt playing Mrs. Venable.
There are passages in Suddenly Last Summer which are perhaps as well written as anything I’ve done.
Some while later I was in Miami, sitting outside my cabana at the pool of the Robert Clay Hotel, when I received a long-distance call from film producer Sam Spiegel. For the first time I made a movie deal myself.
Sam asked what I wanted for the movie rights to Suddenly. I said, “How about fifty grand plus 20 per cent of the profits?”
Sam said, “It’s a deal,” and it was, and the profits were as good as the movie was bad.—that figures.
How films have changed!—for the better. They have outstripped the theatre in honesty, adventure, and technique, despite the fall of Big studios with their star system. Or possibly because of it?
There is quite a difference between classical acting and method acting, and one chance I had to witness this difference was when I had the enormous privilege of seeing Edwige Feuillere in the Paris production of Sweet Bird. This production was put on only a couple of years ago. Now Feuillere is a classical actress, but she is such a fine actress that she could, without any apparent disruption, switch over immediately from her classical style, which is rather declamatory; she could go right from that into very contemporary exchange of dialogue. And she was totally convincing and it was one of the great performances I’ve seen. The play itself got mixed notices in France, but she carried it and I think she toured France with it after the Paris run. Françoise Sagan had adapted Bird for France, and she did a beautiful job on it. She was a close friend of mine; although we didn’t see much of each other, whenever we did, the friendship continued as if there had been no interruption.