It was Hovland, completely under her spell, who drove her back to Via Firenze at the end of the night, in his rented Peugeot, which he’d driven all the way from Paris just for the chance to have a glass of wine with Anna Magnani. Anna herself stayed on at the Fontanone with Don Umberto. “I don’t remember what broke us apart,” she’d said, with a shrug, when they kissed her goodbye in the garden. “Maybe tonight it comes back to me.”
Two years later, Anna played the lead in The Rose Tattoo—her first Hollywood film, direction by Daniel Mann, script by Tennessee Williams and Hal Kanter—and won an Oscar. The same year, Martin Hovland wrote and directed Mercy, which marked the debut of Anja Bloom in a supporting role. They’d been living together in seclusion outside Palermo, in the mountain village of Erice, site of the ancient Temple of Venus, where much of Mercy was filmed. Mercy flopped even with the French. It took a little while before Hovland could find funding for his next film, Angle, but when he did, he cast Anja as the star.
That night at the Fontanone, in the backseat of Hovland’s Peugeot, and then later in the apartment, with Anja asleep in the next room and Paul and Ahmed passed out down the hall, one big happy family, Tenn was as tender as he’d ever been with Frank. It felt like the summer of 1949 again, their love new, the war finally fading into memory, Rome the holy city they pillaged together for the first time. Maybe the guilt of ignoring Frank’s request for a part in Senso had caught up with Tenn now that Anja seemed, as suddenly as she had come, to be on her way. Maybe discussing the film of The Rose Tattoo with Anna brought Tenn back to the love he’d poured out for Frank in the character of Alvaro Mangiacavallo.
Tenn called it the song of the nightingales, what two men did with each other. When it was good, as it was that night, as it so often had been, he’d say, with boyish affection and gratitude, “the nightingales sang sweetly.” Tenn was the undisputed master of words, but when the nightingales were singing, Frank was his equal. As long as Frank had his body, in all of its Frankness, he could tell Tenn exactly what he felt for him. He did not have Tenn’s or Anja’s fluency with words, with poetry, with the imagination. He had great fluency only in the language of the body. How cruel it was for it to fail so young.
* * *
• • •
WHEN IT STARTED, more than five years ago now, around the summer of ’56, the time of Sweet Bird of Youth, he hid the failure from Tenn: the specks of blood in his cough, his weak limbs, the knives stabbing his lungs with every breath. At a workshop of Sweet Bird in Miami, Frank felt dizzy, went to the men’s room, and blacked out; when he returned to the studio, Tenn was furious with him for skipping out on the run-through. Dr. Jacobson had recently stuffed Tenn’s palms with new prescriptions that gave him crazier thoughts than usual. The new pills convinced him that Frank was on the verge of leaving him; they fueled his paranoia that Frank had another man on the side, possibly one of his rivals in the theater, and that he’d fallen in with a dangerous lot. “You’re a dope fiend!” Tenn snarled at Frank when he’d come home from one of the restless late-night walks he needed for air. None of Tenn’s fears were rooted in reality. By that time, Frank was too tired to want anything from another man but a gentle embrace, something Tenn, alternately rageful and raving, looped on Dr. Feelgood’s cocktail of barbiturates and speed, grew increasingly unwilling to give him.
They lived mostly apart after that dreadful summer of ’56, stuck in the States, far from Italy, Frank in the Duncan Street house in Key West, Tenn in New York in the apartment on Sixty-fifth Street. In the days leading up to one of Tenn’s return visits to Florida, Frank would try to sleep as much as he could to build up his strength. He blamed a nagging ulcer, a summer flu, for his pale skin and hunched-over posture. He blamed his thinness on the horse-grade antibiotics the doctor in town was treating him with, the all-liquid diet recommended by some boys at the club. He avoided eating in Tenn’s presence, fearing the nausea that came on in waves after every meal. He wore dark billowy shirts to cover his atrophying arms and oversize linen pants to conceal the matchsticks he had for legs. When the nightingales sang, which they did hardly at all before they ceased completely, Frank made sure it was on nights Tenn had been drinking long and hard, so that the next morning he wouldn’t remember how it had felt to push up against a rack of sick bones. If Tenn had only known the pain his weight caused Frank, how he had to fight for breath through all Tenn’s pushing and twisting, he’d have never let the birds sing at all.
Frank’s brief disappearances in those years, his resistance to sex when Tenn was sober, his constant fatigue and lightheadedness and flimsy excuses for his weight loss, his insistence on staying in Key West when Tenn traveled, only made Tenn’s suspicions of drugs and love affairs grow stronger. In revenge for Frank’s perceived betrayal, Tenn would leave the Duncan Street house unannounced and return in the middle of the night with a new boy, wake Frank up just to flaunt the boy in front of him, and then he’d fuck him in the next room with the doors and windows open so Frank could learn his lesson from their loud yowls and grunts.
It soon became necessary for Frank to live in a different house altogether.
He bought a bungalow on Bakers Lane, a ten-minute drive from Duncan Street. Between their two houses were ten long blocks and a public cemetery and fourteen years of codes and storms and ships and tunnels and nightingales. Frank dreaded every trip over this terrain, any return to the house they’d shared for a decade, which was the place he first met Freddy Nicklaus, the blond poet Tenn called Angel, the man who’d taken his place.
By the end of the 1950s, Frank Merlo no longer recognized his life. Most nights, he stayed home with a book and a pack of smokes and left the front door open in case friends dropped by. His TV, a gift from Tenn, he kept on with the sound all the way down. Gigi was his primary company. He wrote Anja letters filled with happy lies, and she replied with postcards from cities he’d never heard of. When she passed through Miami, early in ’61, he declined her invitation to meet him at her hotel, afraid she would see in his body what he and Tenn could not. On his good nights, he chose a nightclub from the many booming options on Duval Street and drove himself to it. He still had a way with a spin and a twist and a shake. He still could manage a Lindy hop or two. He staggered home just as dawn was breaking, hope in his legs.
This went on for as long as it could. You can hide a thing from the world and from yourself—a pretty story or a hideous one, a fact, a crime, desire—but eventually you’re sitting on the deck at the Magnolia Café with your friend Dan and these guys Mark and Brian who know Dan from somewhere and a bunch of other locals whose names you can’t remember, and you’re taking small bites of soft bread that you wash down with your second margarita of the afternoon and you’re trying to show Dan with your two hands the size of the lizard you scooted out of your living room the night before but instead you start to choke and he asks if you’re all right and you turn away and puke up so much blood it drips through the deck slats and pools on the white sand below. Then Dan takes you to the hospital and waits with you in the airless room and squeezes your hand when the old man points to the white bursts on the X-ray and scolds you for waiting so long, until you’re this far gone, but you can’t take your eyes off the bursts, which you couldn’t possibly have seen before and yet they look familiar, as if from a dream; they don’t shock you; you’ve always known those ghostly figures were there, crowding your heart.
The doctors promised Frank that a quick but serious operation would snuff out all the bursts once and for all. Once that happened, he could get back up to a solid weight. Six months tops, it would take. He was young enough, barely forty, the surgeon reassured him; he had plenty of time to recover; think of it as a “wake-up call.” So Frank vowed to quit smoking. Live clean. Swim twice a day. And then, once this regimen made him the Horse again, once he was steady on his feet, he vowed his own revenge on Tenn for having treated him so barbarously these past few years when death had come
knocking. The operation at Memorial Hospital would set this plan in motion. He booked himself on a late-night flight to New York City.
When Tenn heard about the scene at the café and the dire diagnosis and the flight that followed—not from Frank, but from Dan and Marion Vaccaro and God knows how many queens who’d rung him up to register their sorrow and confusion—he rushed to Frank’s side in Manhattan, as if determined to foil his plan of revenge. It was Tenn’s face Frank saw first when he woke from his surgery the next day. Every night during visiting hours, there was Tenn in the chair beside him, scribbling in his notebook, writing postcards he’d bought from the gift shop, gossiping, reminiscing, as if Memorial were another of their hotels and this one more of their adventures, just like old times.
It enraged Frank, Tenn’s sudden transformation into Florence Nightingale, his gymnastic avoidance of Angel’s name in his presence, his eleventh-hour ministry of remorse. Their friends came by with flowers and pinched faces and hugged Tenn as if he’d been the doting nurse from the start, as if he hadn’t willfully blinded himself to Frank’s wasting away before him, begging him to notice. “Get out of my room,” he said to Tenn, in the days after that first operation. “Leave me alone once and for all. Go be with your Angel.”
“Listen to yourself, Frankie,” Tenn said. His weight on the bed was an insult, every tender word a finger jammed in his eye. “I’ll come every day you’re here.”
“I say I don’t need you!” Frank shouted the next day and the day after that, each time Tenn came through the door. His voice had gone both thin and hoarse from the tubes. He thrashed around feebly in his bed.
The operation was a success, said the surgeon. The bursts were gone. He had performed a kind of miracle. Frank had a life to lead once more. Tenn went back to his poet, and Frank flew home to Bakers Lane alone.
He got stronger. He made plans to visit Anja in Copenhagen or Marrakech or wherever she was. Then, from there, he’d light out for a new city on his own. Or he’d move straight to Rome, grow fat in Trastevere, reunite with Alvaro and spend his days lazing around the Piazza degli Zingari. Tenn agreed to keep him on salary in perpetuity, and of course he still had his 10 percent of The Rose Tattoo and Cat and Camino Real, which would keep growing. The money wouldn’t hold forever, but it gave Frank all the more reason to take action. It was the beginning of the 1960s, and he had a chance for a new life.
A year had gone by since then. No Morocco, no Rome, no Anja, no more meat on his bones. The only time he’d left Key West since that first operation was to come back here to the cobalt unit at Memorial, where the surgeon told him—and this time he wasn’t lying—he’d stay until the end.
10.
DIRECTION
In Anja’s front living room, on the night of Memorial Day, the single copy of Call It Joy lies before them on the coffee table between the family-size bag of those magnificent orange chips and two bottles of Margaux. They sit alongside each other on the sofa, Anja between the two boys. It is decided, after some debate, that Trevor will take Tenn’s lines, Sandrino will play Frank and the Young Patron, and Anja will read the part of Gisele Larson, along with the author’s note and the stage directions.
First Draft for Anja Bloom
New York, November 1982
CALL IT JOY
(A Play in Two Parts)
By
Tennessee Williams
for F.M. and A.B.
CHARACTERS
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, a playwright
GISELE LARSON, his lifelong friend, proprietress of Gisele’s Bar, Key West
YOUNG MALE BAR PATRON/MARK
FRANK MERLO/ANGELO
The set is divided into two rooms of equal size with no partition, so that players may cross seamlessly from one to the other. Stage right the darkened bedroom of a modest Key West bungalow: an unmade queen-size bed with white sheets and a lone rumpled pillow; a nightstand strewn with books and pill bottles; a rocking chair; a Japanese lantern with glass pendants; and a tall dresser with most of its drawers half open, clothes spilling out haphazardly. Stage left a comparatively spare, dimly lit barroom with a working jukebox under a beefcake poster, an empty dance floor, a wall clock that keeps real time set to nine p.m., and saloon-style doors that swing into the wings. On the bedroom side, a washroom door beside the bed provides a parallel exit stage right. The wooden bar, long enough for six stools, stands quarter-turned to the audience at the same angle as the bed. A large rectangular area rug—of any style but Oriental—spans the middle of the proscenium, functioning as both decoration and two-way portal.
This arrangement leaves an intentionally conspicuous negative space upstage center, where the plain white wall of the bedroom meets the dark-paneled wall of the bar. At this intersection grows, fantastically, a large rose bush in full flower. The roses must be red. While silk roses are more practical, ideally the scent of live roses will permeate the theater.
Audiences should consider this production, in particular the character of Tennessee Williams, as a corrective to the author’s cowardice in hiding behind August, the playwright and lead in last year’s Something Cloudy, Something Clear. This play must also be considered an act of penance. Here, Frank Merlo is not a brief and expedient memory wheeled cruelly onto the stage in the violent throes of death, only to be dispensed back into the darkness. In the eyes of Tennessee and Gisele, Frank is as vital and horselike as the man who inspired the creation of Alvaro Mangiacavallo in The Rose Tattoo.
Though some dialogue, names, genders, and setting details have been changed, every word in these pages is true.
SCENE ONE
(With the rise of the curtain, offstage low male chatter, as if from a crowded barroom. TENNESSEE, early seventies but seeming older, haggard, gray-bearded, husky if not stout, sits at the bar drinking a whiskey rocks. GISELE is wiping down the bar. She has a mane of spectacular blonde or white hair and wears a shiny blouse of silver lamé or glittering sequins over designer blue jeans. Though she appears a “tough customer,” an understated elegance belies the grubbiness of her establishment.
Throughout their conversation, Gisele waits on customers invisible to the audience, nodding at them, miming the taking of their money and the pouring of their drinks, winking and smiling at them as she listens and responds to Tennessee.)
TENNESSEE
This one didn’t even bother with the cover of night. Skipped out in the middle of the afternoon, in plain sight. Took my heart medications and the good liquor and all the cash I didn’t have the sense to lock up.
GISELE
Jim, you said his name was?
TENN
Julian. “Call me Julie.” Brains of a starfish, but he came cheap. And like most things that come cheap, he cost me a fortune. Worst of all, he was a bore in the sack.
GISELE
You won’t miss him, then. Don’t worry, another will come along. They always do.
TENN
I sure will miss him when my heart conks out! You think these town doctors care I’ve got nothing for my blood pressure, nothing for sleep, nothing to wake up? Like a first-class criminal they treat me. You should have seen me, half-loony, all alone in my house, nobody looking after me, my fingers shaking over the keys. Julie used to rub my shoulders while I worked, I’ll miss that, and he was a half-decent cook when he made the effort. I kept hearing the front door open, kept seeing his pinched little face in the window, come back with a gang of thugs for the rest of my worldly possessions. How do I know what’s a hallucination and what’s not? I need my pills. I can’t even drive in that state of mind. So I walked down here looking for you, but you were nowhere to be found.
GISELE
They didn’t tell you I was visiting my brother?
TENN
Rafe told me. I sent you both a postcard.
GISELE
We didn’t get it.
TENN
Maybe I didn’t mail it. But I wrote it. San Francisco, California 94114. When’s our Teddy coming back to us?
GISELE
He needs to get his strength up and put on some weight. The doctors won’t release him until they can figure out the cause.
TENN
More doctors! You notice they don’t cure people anymore? Their skills are in placation. Appeasement. I’ve been sick every day of my life and no doctor’s ever done a thing for me but get me high. You should bring him home. So what if he’s skinny? Is that why you invited me here?
GISELE
I wanted to check on you. I haven’t seen you in a while. Rafe told me about Julie. Said you were all torn up, worse than he’s seen you. Said the demons came back again. He wanted me to give you these.
(She pulls out a baggie of pills from her pocket)
He said these should tide you over.
TENN
O, bless that beautiful man!
(He fumbles with the baggie, his hands trembling, and chases two of the pills with the whiskey)
He’ll be in for the late crowd?
GISELE
As always. But listen, Tenn—will you stay with me until then? Keep me company? Can you do that? Your voice is a comfort to me.
TENN
Of course.
GISELE
Seeing Teddy that way, it got me remembering our good times here. The three of us and Frankie. Those days aren’t coming back, Tenn. The nights I don’t see you, when you’re away, I feel like the only woman left alive. The boys who come in all look alike: same mustache, same white low-cut shirts with their chest hair puffing out. They get younger and younger and their pants tighter and tighter.
(laughs)
I can’t tell them apart.
Leading Men Page 20
