Leading Men

by Christopher Castellani

  “There!” said Anja. The only one paying attention, she was the first to spot the turn to the Piazza San Marco.

  Too tired to remove their shoes or to roll up their pants or to look for a way around the acqua alta, they let the water rush over them. On the other side of the square, they found a guy willing to ferry them to the Excelsior on a private boat. He gave them towels to dry their feet and a blanket for their legs. They sat on the leather banquette, Frank in the middle with his arms around Tenn and Anja, holding them close to keep warm. Tenn fell immediately asleep. Anja was shivering. The wind had undone her hair. It lashed Frank’s face as they sped across the lagoon toward the breaking sun. How would they fill this day? And the next?

  “The New York Ballet is performing at the Opera,” Frank said. “What do you say I get us tickets when we’re back in Rome?”

  “I have never seen a ballet.”

  “Well, then it’s time,” Frank said. “I used to think the ballet was a bore. Then I educated myself. I couldn’t afford the shows, so I’d sweet-talk my way into City Center to watch them rehearse. Once I saw up close what those guys could do, and found out I could move like that, too—without much effort either, if you want to know the truth—all I wanted was to keep doing it.”

  “Your next part will be in a musical,” she said.

  “Wouldn’t that be a gas?”

  “Can you sing?”

  “You tell me,” Frank said, and, in his best Maria Callas, belted out “Pace, Pace, Mio Dio” until he lost his breath, and they doubled over in giggles. The driver turned and glared.

  Tenn let out a snort and nuzzled closer. “Frankie,” he said. “You’re scaring the fish.”

  “Perhaps the soprano is beyond your range,” said Anja.

  “I’ve heard that before,” said Frank. “Just give me a few lessons, though. I pick things up easy. We’ll take them together in New York. Unless you’ve got a natural voice, too, on top of everything?”

  “Is that your way of tricking me into singing for you?”

  “Yes?”

  She ran her thumb and forefinger across her lips as if to zip them shut.

  That they would never see each other in New York, that this was the end and not the beginning of their nights together, was inconceivable to Frank then. They slunk down on the banquette and whispered like lovers in the back row of a movie theater, Tenn’s sleeping head now in Frank’s lap. Frank stroked his curls. Anja tucked the end of the blanket under his head to make a pillow on Frank’s knee. She wanted to see their house on Duncan Street, she said, and Frank said yes, of course, she was welcome to visit and stay with them anytime, to sit in the shade of the banana trees and the Australian pines, but once she came all the way to Key West, shouldn’t she continue on with them to all the other light and delicate places they frequented—to New Orleans, to Provincetown, to London—and wasn’t it exciting to imagine what other cities they’d meet each other in, the three of them, over the long years of their lives?

  When he told her that Senso would likely premiere at the Venice Film Festival next September, she promised to come back for it from wherever she was in the world. She could still be in Erice with Hovland, she said, or there might be no Hovland at all. Who knows? She might be living in Venice already, working at La Fenice as a cigarette girl. She’d take a train or a boat or a plane, she’d walk barefoot if she had to, whatever it took to be in the audience on the night Frank Merlo spoke his first words on screen.

  When he explained that those words—“Your friend, in the granary, he’s not safe”—would be dubbed into Italian for the Venice premiere, and that it would take a few months, at least, before the English version with Frank’s actual voice would be released in the States, Anja pouted. “It is too long to wait,” she said.

  “My first fan,” Frank said.

  “Second,” said Tenn.

  “I should’ve known you were eavesdropping,” Frank said.

  “How else can I find out what’s really going on,” said Tenn, his eyes still closed. “A cigarette girl? Where’d you get that idea?”

  “Anna told me that is how Lana Turner was discovered.”

  “You’re already discovered!” said Frank.

  Anja thought a moment, her eyes fixed on the sky, which was now a dark and fuzzy pink. The stars were dwindling by the second. “Anna told me, ‘It takes more than one man to make your life.’”

  When they arrived at the Excelsior, the other guests were coming down the stairs in their silk robes, looking for breakfast. Frank and Tenn slept into the early afternoon, and upon waking, the nightingales sang—for them and them alone—a brief and perfect song.

  They drove back to Via Firenze the next day. Anja gathered her suitcase, her dresses, the vase of Murano glass she bought with her own money—everything she owned—and loaded them into Hovland’s Peugeot for the two-kilometer trip to the Colosseum. As a parting gift, Frank handed her two tickets to the ballet for Friday, the eighteenth of September, less than two weeks away, the soonest they were available. She and Hovland were to come to the apartment at six p.m., smoke the last of the kif with them, and then the quartet would walk down Via Firenze to the Opera.

  “My first ballet and my first double date,” Anja said. She kissed him, and then Tenn, on both cheeks, before turning again to Frank. She held him by the shoulders, looking up at him clumsily, as if to steady herself. For a moment, one foot hanging off the edge of the curb, she laid her head on his chest. She then stepped into the car, and she and Hovland sped away.

  When the evening of the eighteenth came, Frank and Tenn waited in their tuxes until seven. Frank paced the hallway, cursing Hovland’s cheap apartment, which he’d never seen, for not having a dedicated phone. The only way to reach them was to drive over themselves, but there was no time, and besides, it was unseemly to chase down a person you’d given a gift to, as if to enforce it, as if she owed you something for a kindness she never asked for.

  At seven thirty, they walked to the Opera alone. Throughout the performance, Frank trained his eye on the guys he recognized from City Center, conjuring Anja so that he could point out for her the force of their legs, the lightness of the girls they tossed and caught, the deceptive ease of all that twirling and leaping. But the seats beside him remained stubbornly, puzzlingly, empty. The next morning, he took a taxi to Hovland’s address. The landlady informed him that Signor had been gone for almost two weeks, and that, no, he’d never had a woman living with him; if he had, she’d have known about it. The place was too small even for one, she said.

  By the time Frank learned what had happened to Anja—that, the morning she moved out of Via Firenze, Hovland drove them straight to Civitavecchia, where they boarded a ferry to Palermo, and then hired a car to take them up the mountain to Erice—he’d already forgiven her. He blamed her age, her sex, the ice at her core. He was still high on his triumph, immune, however briefly, to petty grievances and disappointments, to the disappearing act the girl would come to perfect after years of practice. Once you’ve abandoned a mother, Frank reasoned, you can abandon anyone. He missed her, but they had the Venice premiere to look forward to—the year would pass in the blink of an eye—and, in the meantime, he had work to do.

  Visconti sent Tenn letters and telegrams and called him at odd hours from Verona and Mantua. He even showed up once at Via Firenze, dragging along the beleaguered Suso, author of the Italian version of the Senso script, as if putting yet another writer in the room was going to help matters. He’d shot more scenes all over the country, but the film was not coming together. He’d gone so far over budget that further costs, further delays, became meaningless. Frank read his letters out loud to Tenn and listened in on their conversations, trying to devise a way for Gabriele Rossini to rescue the film and make himself a hero for Visconti, but Frank’s ideas, according to Tenn, were either too expensive to pull off or too minor to make a diffe
rence.

  Frank arranged for short trips to Naples and Positano, where Tenn could work with fewer distractions, and where Visconti couldn’t so easily track him down. The days wore on. Tenn was growing tired of the story, he said to Frank, and of Visconti’s perfectionism. He began to refer to Senso as the “wop Gone with the Wind.” He wanted desperately to be free of it, to devote his full energy to the drafts of what would become Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, to Battle of Angels, to anything else. Even Italy he was weary of. This mess of a film could only be solved by a change of scene, Tenn said. So, in early October, they sailed together to Spain.

  In Madrid, in Málaga, Tenn worked in the hotel at all hours and Frank went out dancing. He told the boys he met that he was an actor. The name of the film dropped from his lips like a jewel. “It’s like an Italian Gone with the Wind,” he said, proudly.

  “What a great idea!” they said.

  By winter, they were back in Key West. To the house on Duncan Street came a long letter from Visconti, posted from Ischia. Frank read it with Mr. Moon in his lap and Tenn standing behind him, his hand on his shoulder. To understand Livia Serpieri, Visconti explained, the audience did not need further evidence of her wantonness, more foreshadowing of her dissolution. The film was already too long. For these reasons, the decision to cut the Vicenza scene, and others Tenn had written, was an easy one. He assured Tenn that the rest of his beautiful dialogue—especially the scene between Livia and Franz and the prostitute in Verona—remained intact. Those scenes were among the finest in the film. He made no mention of Frank, or of Gabriele, by name. He had no regrets to send to him or to anyone. When Tenn left the room, Frank read the letter again, but he still couldn’t find himself in it.

  At the world premiere of Senso nearly a year later, September 2, 1954, Anja was in London with Hovland and Tenn was on his way to Taormina and Frank was sitting with strangers in the back row of the crowded hall in Venice. The swooning public filled every seat and the gentlemen stood in the aisles while Visconti paced up and down the gallery, shaking hands with Rock Hudson and Scott David and the reporters asking for his comments on Senso and Rear Window and the rebirth of Italian cinema and his chances of winning the Golden Lion. Whether or not Visconti noticed Frank, he did not approach him. Frank sank lower in his chair, ignoring the strangers to his right and left, his dry throat, his pounding chest. Anja had urged him not to go at all. He belonged in Taormina with Tenn, she said; he belonged in England with her; he belonged in Rome with Anna; he belonged anywhere but in Venice.

  Frank had promised her he would not show up at the Festival, that he’d swim and write and practice the monologue she mailed him from Ostrovsky’s Diary of a Scoundrel. Instead he booked one night at the shabbiest hotel in Santa Croce and the late train there and the early train back, and now here he was in the hall as the lights came down and the music drowned his thoughts and the crowd erupted in applause. The screen lit up with the title of the film and the crowd applauded. The names Alida Valli and Farley Granger appeared and the crowd applauded. The name Tennessee Williams appeared and the crowd applauded and, for the first and only time, Frank did, too. Then the film began, and their hands went quiet.

  When Countess Livia Serpieri began to make her way down the gravel path toward the fire, the crowd did not see a young country merchant in a three-piece suit call to her and pull her aside. They did not hear their exchange, or see her pull away from him and run off. Frank watched for the flicker in the film that marked the moment he was cut, the seam that proved he had once been a part of the story. But there was no seam. The sequence was smooth. Visconti was a perfectionist, after all. The Countess ran down the path unmolested, past the washerwomen, the sheets floating like ghosts, just as they had on that day in September. How could the people around him know that a man named Gabriele Rossini stood hiding behind that high stone wall, watching her every move, waiting for his moment to strike, if they couldn’t see him? In that scene, now gone forever, he’d enthralled Livia. She’d spoken his name in fear, clutching her shawl. Frank wished he had someone he could tell.

  16.

  CALL IT JOY

  Four days before the dress rehearsal, Anja arrives at the hotel in Provincetown. Her manager has chosen a place close to the commotion of the Atlantic House but secluded and expensive enough to ensure her privacy. They put her in an octagonal room called the Moroccan Tower, which they have filled with pan-African rugs and statues and tapestries. For a moment, she pretends they have done this in homage to her deathbed scene in Runaway, but of course this room is available to anyone with the money to pay for it.

  On the drive from the Moroccan Tower to the Atlantic House, she passes under banners splashed with photos of herself and Tenn from the sixties, their young faces smiling at each other across the traffic. The actors playing Tenn and Frank/Angelo and Young Patron/Mark did not qualify for the banners. They are locals—“no-names,” Keith calls them—chosen so as not to distract from the true stars: Tennessee Williams as playwright and subject, Anja Bloom as Gisele Larson and Director.

  Sally waits for her on the porch of the A-House. She has proven as formidable as Keith warned. She priced the tickets for the once-in-a-lifetime show at one thousand dollars each, with the proceeds split 50/50 between the Theater Festival and the forthcoming Atlantic House Cultural Center, due to break ground next spring. To make those proceeds “meaningfully transformative” for both nonprofits, Sally convinced Anja to fund all of the play’s production costs, including the salaries of the actors, set designers, and line producer. She made the tickets available only by private invitation. After their payments were confirmed, Sally emailed the guest list to Anja annotated with biographical sketches and notes on their future donor potential. She refers to the play as a “seed event.” The guests are supporters of various arts organizations and other liberal causes; the president of Pieter’s university; and a few politicians, including two current and former Massachusetts state senators; they are developers and socialites and media and the Swedish-born actress Ann-Margret, whose fan mail Anja still occasionally receives.

  With Sally and Keith and David, the Festival director, looking on from across the dance floor of the club, Anja leads her cast in the first official table read. The set is half constructed behind them: the bed, the jukebox, the extravagant rose bush. The actors have had weeks to memorize their lines, but this is the first time they have all met in person.

  Anja closes her eyes and listens to their voices and intonations, scrawling notes blind onto a legal pad. She saves the faces and the bodies for later rehearsals. Just as Tenn begins his Bangkok soliloquy, she hears the creak of the door, and in walks Sandrino with Trevor, sheepishly, from the porch. The read was scheduled for ten o’clock, and it is now past eleven. Sandrino blows her a kiss. They take their seats beside the others. She closes her eyes again.

  She has not seen Sandrino since the night of the séance. She left him and the city without notice. When he heard nothing from her for weeks, he came to her apartment and found it emptied out and sold. Eventually, she mailed him a handwritten letter. Now they keep in touch the newfangled way. It breaks his heart, he says, every time he thinks of the city without her in it.

  By the time Sandrino returned from Italy in September, Trevor had taken up with a married advertising executive sixteen years his senior. Trevor is currently waiting around for the man to leave his wife, and then they, too, will make a fresh start somewhere else. Sandrino feels abandoned, he tells Anja on Skype. His face on the screen is dark and grainy; he needs more lamps. He loves no one in the city quite the way he loves her and Trevor, and he still has two more years left in his program. He clings to the hope that Trevor will come to his senses. In his mind, this week in romantic Provincetown, and the debut of the play the two of them helped usher into the world, is his last chance to relight the fire.

  When Mark starts serenading Tenn with “What’ll I Do?” Sandrino rests his head on Trevor
’s perfidious shoulder. Trevor shrugs him off, and, in that moment, Anja decides the song is all wrong and must be changed. “I find ‘What’ll I Do?’ too expository and on-target for a man mourning his lost love, do you not agree?” she asks the cast, and of course, yes, absolutely, they do agree with her. She suggests “Danny Boy” instead, “one of Tenn’s favorites,” and again they nod vigorously. Mark calls it a “genius move,” which it is not; at best, it is a mitigating move. The men in the cast are collegial and loose and flirty with each other, but with Anja they are tentative, timid, deferential. She was hoping at least one of them would fight her, that they would guard with some fierceness the words and intentions of Tennessee Williams, whom they claim to idolize. But, for now, they go along with every one of her admittedly capricious directorial adjustments.

  Her task for the rest of the day is to work with the two other leads. To her frustration, the best Tenn can offer her is a caricature of the drawling Southern drunkard. He has educated himself with tell-all memoirs and YouTube videos of Tennessee Williams at his most dissolute. He has made the common mistake of conflating him with the blinkered and babbling Truman Capote as interviewed on The Stanley Siegel Show; or maybe he is doing Blanche DuBois at her most hysterical. When he chooses to cling to this interpretation despite Anja’s correctives, she reminds him, sensing the first hints of his resistance, that she is the only one in this room who knew the real Tennessee Williams. The man did not hate himself, she preaches to him; he enjoyed his life, his work, his men, his fame, his starlets, his travels, his triumph over his family, his body, his wit, his money.