Memoirs

by Tennessee Williams

  Both Eli and Maureen were very active in the Actors’ Studio and had benefited a great deal from the “method” as taught by Lee Strasberg and also at that time by Elia Kazan and Robert Lewis. We opened in Chicago. Claudia Cassidy, theatre reviewer for the Chicago Tribune, didn’t seem quite to know what to make of it, as a follow-up of Menagerie and Streetcar, but she gave us a pretty good notice and we had a pretty good run, about two months in the Windy City.

  The Rose Tattoo was my love-play to the world. It was permeated with the happy young love for Frankie and I dedicated the book to him, saying: “To Frankie in Return for Sicily.”

  And the epigraph, a quote from the author of Exile, the poet St.-Jean Perse, went something like this.

  “Life is beautiful as a ram’s head painted red and nailed over a doorway.”

  Anna Magnani was magnificent as Serafina in the movie version of Tattoo. I often wonder how Anna Magnani managed to live within society and yet to remain so free of its conventions. She was as unconventional a woman as I have known in or out of my professional world, and if you understand me at all, you must know that in this statement I am making my personal estimate of her honesty, which I feel was complete.

  Of course I also existed outside of conventional society while contriving somewhat precariously to remain in contact with it. For me this was not only precarious but a matter of dark unconscious disturbance. For Anna what was it? Since she has written no memoirs of the sort I’m writing, or any sort at all, that question is going to remain a question. I can only say that she never exhibited any lack of self-assurance, any timidity in her relations with that society outside of whose conventions she quite publicly existed.

  She looked absolutely straight into the eyes of whomever she confronted and during that golden time in which we were dear friends I never heard a false word from her mouth.

  I think that’s rather a lot to say for the lady. Still, I have a lot more to say for Anna and much of it is inexpressible now, so much of it that these recollections are bound to be fragmentary …

  Shyness always having been my great problem with people (although I often come on, these days, with a display of an assurance which is sometimes quite as spurious as it may be startling), at first I was very shy of Anna. But with Frankie as an intermediary between my reserve and her beautifully natural lack of it, the shyness was soon to go.

  Merlo was a first-generation Sicilian. Magnani was a Roman. With that sharing of the Latin, or Mediterranean, temperament, as well as an equal directness, they had no need for a tentative period before understanding and loving.

  Anna never got up for the day before it was afternoon. At about 2:30 or 3 P.M. the phone would ring.

  After “Ciao, Tenn,” she would say, “What is the program?”

  She always offered me this courteous question, though I suspect she had already decided what the program was to be. I have said she never spoke falsely, but to permit a close friend to think he’s arranging an evening’s program is not a dissimulation but a simple act of politeness. I have the same habit. I always know pretty well what my program is going to be, at least as far as a program can be known in advance of its performance, but when I call a friend, with my program for the evening more or less determined, I will always say, “I have no plan for the evening, how about you.”

  At eight o’clock Merlo and I would arrive at her apartment on top of the Palazzo Altieri (near the Pantheon): a distraught-looking maid would admit us to the living room. On the table there would always be a bowl of ice, bowls of pretzels and peanuts, two tall glasses and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label. We’d sit there and drink and wait, and it was sometimes close to an hour, but it passed agreeably. We had our drinks and wandered out on her terrace to look over Vecchia Roma, gleaming softly through late dusk, and from the back rooms of the apartment we’d hear Anna shouting orders that were loud but resonant with affection.

  Often her current young man would appear half an hour before Anna. He would greet us with a sort of suspicious civility and stretch himself out in a chair or on a chaise with an air of sleepy detachment.

  At last Anna, brilliant with animation and expansive feeling, would burst into the room, and she was ready to charge forth upon “the program.” She had her own private elevator which took us directly down to the huge, shadowy courtyard in which she kept two or three luxurious cars. Occasionally, not often, she’d allow her young man to drive, but she much preferred driving herself and was a fantastically good driver. Roman traffic didn’t seem to exist for her. The young man would usually maintain his sulky silence while she and Frank talked away like a pair of children on the way to a fun-fair. We never inquired where we were going for dinner: that was a matter which she’d already decided and her choice was always perfect. Restaurateurs and waiters received her like a queen: they hovered beaming around the table while she ordered wines, pastas, salads, entrees without consulting the menu. This doesn’t sound like good behavior and yet it was the best. Every meal was a feast which it would take Ernest Hemingway with his gourmet appreciation to describe with justice.

  The evening would never let down: it was centered around the dinner, but after the coffees, Anna would demand a great sack of leftovers. And then we would start our midnight course about Rome, visiting all those places where the hungry stray cats were waiting for her to feed them: the Forum, the Colosseum, under certain bridges, in Trastevere, in parts of the Villa Borghese.

  This done, she would return to the palazzo to pick up her lupo, a big black German shepherd which I had given her when its predecessor of the same breed succumbed to old age. It would almost pre-empt the back seat of the car; she would drive it straight to the Villa Borghese. There she’d let it out and it would race with the car along a bridle path until it was panting, and ready to hop back in.

  Then we would drive to Rosati’s on Via Veneto, in deference chiefly to my desire for a nightcap. Anna was not a drinker of anything but wine. Frank Merlo would have caffè espresso. The young man with Anna would stretch out his long, elegant legs and sip a liqueur with his eyes half open. Anna would shoot glances toward him, somewhere between two opposite emotions. And she would always comment sorrowfully on my need for whiskey. Late as it was, by this time, the Veneto would still be crowded and the sidewalk strollers would slow down to glance with wonder at this darkly shimmering woman. Of course there were frequent assaults of paparazzi, those kids with flash-cameras who swarm about Rome at night in search of “name faces.” Anna would endure them for a few moments, then she would shout them away in a fashion that dispersed them at once but in good humor.

  Our car would be waiting in that shadowy courtyard of the Palazzo Altieri. We would escort her to the glass-walled outdoor elevator.

  “Ciao, caro, ciao, bello, ciao, ciao, ciao!”

  Kisses and embraces. Then she would step into the elevator and her young man would follow and we’d see her staring at his enigmatic face with great eyes on fire, as the lift rose out of view.

  She was beyond convention as no one I’ve known in my life, and I suspect that was our great bond and that it was the root of her proud assurance, as much as it was the root of my own lack of it and the sense of guilt that must always shadow my life.

  In the early fifties Bill Inge invited me one day to lunch at the Algonguin. He appeared to be sort of sanctimoniously morose, if you get what I mean, and in the course of the dismal lunch he abruptly, out of nowhere, came up with this question: “Tennessee, don’t you feel that you are blocked as a writer?”

  My answer: “Yes, I do, I’ve always been blocked as a writer, but I love writing so much that I always break through the block.”

  I feel that Bill’s primary problem was one of pathological egocentricity: he could not take a spell of failures after his run of smash hits: so eventually he was cared for by two male nurses.

  I think of a line from Kingdom of Earth.

  “Life is rock and man has got to be rock, too, or one of them’s gonna brea
k and the one that breaks is never gonna be life”—or something like that …

  As I said earlier, I wrote the first draft of Camino in New Orleans in 1946; that was the manuscript Audrey Wood told me to put away and not show to anybody. Her reaction had depressed me so that I thought the play must be really quite awful. Then a few years later, I was in New York and dropped by the Actors’ Studio. Kazan was conducting an exercise with Eli Wallach and Barbara Baxley and some other student actors—and they were performing Ten Blocks on the Camino Real. I realized that Audrey had been altogether mistaken, that it played remarkably well, and I said, “Oh, Kazan, we must do this. We must do this with one other play maybe, for Broadway.” There was no Off-Broadway in those days. He agreed. He was very excited about the idea and we exchanged letters about it all that summer (when I was in Rome, and he was in New York). Then suddenly Kazan accepted an assignment to direct some other play; I was upset and retreated to Key West. But I wouldn’t relinquish the idea of Ten Blocks on the Camino Real so I continued to work on it and expanded it into Camino Real.

  Meanwhile, the play that Kazan had decided to do in preference to Ten Blocks was a failure. There’s poetic justice. And then he was ready to take on the revised play of Camino Real.

  Well, it was a big thing to take on at that time, but Kazan has never been lacking in courage and he went ahead. The rehearsals were very, very exciting and the out-of-town reception of the play was very, very puzzled. A great many people walked out during the performance. People seemed outraged by its innovations.

  It had felt exciting to work on. I knew that I was doing new and different things and it excited me and I thought that they would work under Kazan. They did work, except the audience generally did not want them to work; the audience wasn’t with it at the time. Now they are, they love the play now. Camino was the first time on Broadway of which I know when actors ran down the aisles and went out into the audience. This technique was used legitimately, I thought; nobody got stepped on, except me, for writing it that way. But it was great fun out of town despite the outraged reactions of a considerable portion of the audience.

  I always had fun working with Kazan.

  Most critics were quite cross about the play, too, but some of them recognized the innovations and gave them some credit.

  For the Philadelphia opening, Frank and I stayed in a hotel and our suite was directly above that of the singer Johnny Ray. He was just coming on big at that time with a song called “The Little White Cloud That Cried,” and we got to meet him and he was a delightful companion. Kazan and Frankie and I all visited him backstage and he inscribed photographs for us. I still have one in New Orleans. He was a very nice kid but he couldn’t stay out of trouble.

  One night after a performance of Camino, at the Shubert in Philadelphia, the producer Saint Subber was in the audience and after the show he rushed up to me and shouted, “Maestro!” and threw himself to his knees in front of me. I thought this was a most disgraceful performance, too hysterical. He made great protestations of adulation to me, which, I’m afraid, were somewhat insincere as I never saw or heard from him since. That’s show business.

  Kazan had cast the entire show out of the Actors’ Studio, an organization that was a very important thing in the great days—I guess I should say the prosperous days—of Broadway, during my time in the forties and the fifties. Those were two great decades of the Actors’ Studio. Nearly every great actor of promise studied there. And the Actors’ Studio technique fitted so well my type of play. And, the Actors’ Studio—with Kazan, Strasberg, and Bobby Lewis—was a great place for actors to go and compare notes on each other’s work and it gave them a sort of home base.

  Camino Real opened in New York in 1953. I sat in a box with Mother and Dakin and I remember thinking that, although it may have been flawed, it surpassed its flaws.

  Then there was the after-opening party and the New York reviews began to come in. They were savage about this play, which freed so much of contemporary American theatre from realistic constrictions.

  That night I suffered the usual apocalypse of New York opening nerves. I fled the party and the reviews to my apartment on East Fifty-eighth with Frankie. I tried to go to bed but I couldn’t. Frankie was a marvel of controlled cool empathy.

  At about 1 A.M., Kazan and his wife arrived at the door, and to my dismay they were accompanied by Mr. and Mrs. John Steinbeck.

  Then I did go quite mad and I shouted at Kazan, “How dare you bring these people here tonight?”

  Then I slammed into my bedroom and bolted the door.

  I’ve never wished to be seen by virtual strangers at a time of crisis.

  The Kazans and Steinbecks, despite this less than cordial reception, stayed on for an hour in the apartment and Frankie continued to be a marvel. He served them drinks and explained my nature to them, which I’m afraid he always knew very well but which, in a time of crisis, he would usually defend …

  Kazan and I had lunch the next day at a fish-place and things were set in perspective.

  Of course poor Cheryl Crawford, the producer, had decided to close. The last week of the run she cut out the confetti in the big carnival scene as an act of economy, despite the fact that the play, after its closing announcement, was playing to capacity.

  Parties, in the fifties. I remember how Irene Mayer Selznick, daughter of that awful old Louis B., used to invite me to socially prestigious dinners at the Pierre and say, “Ask Frankie to drop in afterward.”

  “Tell her to go fuck herself,” was his invariable and proper remark when I relayed these insulting invitations.

  Again in this context, I remember when Jack Warner entertained me and Frankie in his private dining room on the Warner lot. He was bullying some subordinates who had appeared slightly late for lunch.

  Frankie stared at him with an expressionless fixity which Warner finally noticed.

  “What do you do, young man?”

  Without a change of expression and in a loud, clear voice, Frank replied, “I sleep with Mr. Williams.”

  Jack Warner may have dropped his fork but Frank didn’t blink an eye as he continued to stare steadily at the old tyrant.

  Well, now, about plays, what about them? Plays are written and then, if they are lucky, they are performed, and if their luck still holds, which is not too frequently the case, their performance is so successful that both audience and critics at the first night are aware that they are being offered a dramatic work which is both honest and entertaining and also somehow capable of engaging their aesthetic appreciation.

  I have never liked to talk about the professional side of my life. Am I afraid that it is a bird that will be startled away by discussion, as by a hawk’s shadow? Something like that, I suppose.

  People are always asking me, at those symposia to which I’ve been subjected in recent years, which is my favorite among the plays I have written, the number of which eludes my recollection, and I either say to them, “Always the latest” or I succumb to my instinct for the truth and say, “I suppose it must be the published version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”

  That play comes closest to being both a work of art and a work of craft. It is really very well put together, in my opinion, and all its characters are amusing and credible and touching. Also it adheres to the valuable edict of Aristotle that a tragedy must have unity of time and place and magnitude of theme.

  The set in Cat never changes and its running time is exactly the time of its action, meaning that one act, timewise, follows directly upon the other, and I know of no other modern American play in which this is accomplished.

  However my reasons for liking Cat best are deeper than that. I believe that in Cat I reached beyond myself, in the second act, to a kind of crude eloquence of expression in Big Daddy that I have managed to give no other character of my creation.

  The story of Cat’s production in 1954 and the disaster that followed upon its enormous success must be told now.

  Kazan immediately sh
ared Audrey’s enthusiasm for Cat but he said that it was faulty in one act. I assumed that he meant the first act, but no, it was the third act. He wanted a more admirable heroine than the Maggie offered in the original script.

  Inwardly I disagreed. I thought that in Maggie I had presented a very true and moving portrait of a young woman whose frustration in love and whose practicality drove her to the literal seduction of an unwilling young man. Seduction is too soft a word. Brick was literally forced back to bed by Maggie, when she confiscated his booze …

  Then I also had to violate my own intuition by having Big Daddy re-enter the stage in Act Three. I saw nothing for him to do in that act when he re-entered and I did not think that it was dramatically proper that he should re-enter. Consequently I had him tell “the elephant story.” This was assaulted by censors. I was told it must be removed. The material which I then had to put in its place was always offensive to me.

  I would not tell you this except for the consequences to me as a writer after Cat had received its Critics’ Award and its Pulitzer.

  Even though I always go crazy on opening nights, the New York opening of Cat was particularly dreadful. I thought it was a failure, a distortion of what I had intended. After the show was over I thought I had heard coughs all during the performance. I suppose there weren’t that many, probably the usual number. And it did become my biggest, my longest-running play. But after the show was over on opening night, Kazan said, “Let’s go to my apartment until the reviews are out.” He was totally confident that it would be a hit. I met Audrey Wood outside, and at the time I was totally dependent on her for any creative confidence; and so I said, “Audrey, we’re all going up to the Kazans’ to wait for the notices.” She said, “Oh no, I have other plans.” I was hurt, and said something mean.