Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

by John Lahr

With Wood and Selznick riding shotgun, Williams traveled straight to New York from Charleston to choose a director. “Irene is nice but overwhelmingly energetic and a real slave driver,” Williams wrote to Pancho, with an apology for the detour North. He went on, “This is a tough job, baby, but a great deal—in fact, everything—depends on it. I just hope the old Toro will stand up under the pressure!” Joshua Logan, John Huston, Margo Jones, Tyrone Guthrie, and Kazan were on the short list; but once Williams saw Kazan’s production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, the Broadway hit of the season, he recognized the “strong but fastidious director” he’d been hoping to find. All My Sons exuded what Williams called Kazan’s “peculiar vitality.” Williams wanted Kazan, and only him.

  “The cloudy dreamy type, which I admit to being, needs the complementary eye of the more objective and dynamic worker,” Williams wrote Kazan, by way of special pleading to direct his play. “I believe you are also a dreamer. There are dreamy touches in your direction which are vastly provocative but you have the dynamism my work needs.” Selznick rushed the script to Kazan, but the thirty-eight-year-old director didn’t rush to read it. However, his wife, Molly Day Thacher, who had championed Williams for the Group Theatre prize he had won in 1938, read his copy. She considered Streetcar a masterpiece. When Williams called the house wanting to know her husband’s reaction, she told him so. “Gadg likes a thesis,” Williams said to her. “I haven’t made up my mind what the thesis of this play is.” Thacher hounded her husband to read it. When he did, Kazan had “reservations.” “I wasn’t sure Williams and I were the same kind of theatre animal,” he said.

  Williams was shy, standoffish, and fragile; Kazan, on the other hand, was brash, extroverted, and powerful. Williams was discombobulated; Kazan was a fixer, known to his colleagues as “Gadg”—short for “gadget”—a remnant from his stagehand days and his ability to make himself useful. He was all sinew and sensibility; he exuded a sure-footed, ruthless vigor. A notorious philanderer who wrapped himself in the charisma of his prowess, Kazan bustled through his days with an irresistible appetite for life. Although their temperaments dramatically differed, both Williams and Kazan were pathfinders who wanted to change the shape of American theater. In acting, Kazan was pioneering the same unflinching interior exploration of the self that Williams’s plays were attempting on the page. “What our stage does is put a strong light on a person, on the inner life, the feelings of a person. These become monumental things,” he explained. As an actor with the Group Theatre in the 1930s, Kazan had the distinction of shouting, “Strike! Strike! Strike!”—the rabble-rousing theatrical mantra of the decade—in Clifford Odets’s iconic Waiting for Lefty (1935). Kazan earned the soubriquet “Proletarian Thunderbolt.” “I was intense, an intensity that came from pent-up anger in me,” he said. “I was like an instrument with only three or four very strong notes.”

  As a director of actors, however, Kazan had an almost symphonic ability to draw out and to orchestrate the tones and textures of his cast. “The best actors’ director of any I’ve worked for,” Marlon Brando said. “The only one who ever really stimulated me, got into a part with me. . . . He was an arch-manipulator of actors’ feelings.” (In 1947, two months before A Streetcar Named Desire opened on Broadway, Kazan co-founded The Actors Studio, a systematic elaboration of instinct and impulse that changed the look and naturalistic feel of modern performing, a way of making the hard look easy and the easy look interesting.) Kazan admired Williams’s “emotionalism.” On the page, Williams oversaw his characters in exactly the same complex way Kazan attended to physical detail on the stage. “All his characters are felt for. No one is a heavy,” Kazan said. “He doesn’t tend to clean things up, clear them up, straighten them out, oversimplify, or the rest of that kind of dramatic claptrap.”

  After their first meeting, Kazan was disarmed of his theatrical doubts. “His modesty took me by surprise,” he said of Williams. “We had a plain talk and liked each other immediately.” Both Kazan and Williams were sexual and social rebels. “We were both freaks,” Kazan wrote. “He was, as I was, a disappearer.” They shared a profound curiosity about the vagaries of the human heart; in Kazan’s case, since Williams was the first homosexual to whom Kazan had ever been close, this included the two of them going on double dates and sharing the same hotel bedroom for their homosexual/heterosexual couplings—after which, Kazan wrote, “My curiosity was satisfied.”

  In Williams’s eyes, he and Kazan made “a perfect team.” “Our union, immediate on first encounter, was close but unarticulated,” Kazan said. “It endured for the rest of his life.” Both Williams and Kazan were romantic individualists who shared a faith in the instinctual and in excellence; each in their own way aspired to “burst the soul’s sleep.” They both also insisted on working as artists in the commercial theater. “I read the play again last night with no phones ringing and I felt close to you,” Kazan wrote Williams after their first meeting. “I’ll do everything possible to do your play. But I work best in single collaboration with the author. I’ll never go back to working for a producer when it means consulting with him (her) on every point as well as with administrators, executives, production committees, agents, backers and various and sundry personal associates.” He added, “All meetings on ‘All My Sons’ were between two people, Miller and me; that is the best way.”

  Kazan was preparing Williams for his putsch of the system of American theatrical production. “I believed that those same powers over aspects of a production belonged to the director, that he, not the producer, should be the overlord of a production,” Kazan wrote. In other words, using a great play as leverage, Kazan was proposing that the workers take over the means of production and that the masters take an executive backseat. The show’s unique above-the-title billing—“Elia Kazan’s Production of”—announced this silent revolution in theatrical command. For the first time ever in American theater history, the production would be controlled by the artists who made it, not the producers who paid for it.

  Before this formulation was arrived at, a great deal of blood had to pass under the bridge. Kazan’s asking price was, according to Williams, “pretty stiff.” Besides the usual directing fees and percentage of the ticket sales, Kazan wanted a 20 percent share of the profit and billing as co-producer. “Considering that I felt our producer was a beginner, for whom I would have to do much of the work of production, I thought (and do now think) this protective billing was fair enough,” Kazan wrote in his autobiography. Williams and Selznick were not of the same opinion. Kazan’s demands sent them both into a momentary flop sweat. Nobody was thinking too clearly. Seeing no way out of the rancorous stalemate, Williams suggested “an alternative which I think is even preferable.” He put himself and Margo Jones forward as possible co-directors. “In writing a play I see each scene, in fact every movement and inflection, as vividly as if it were occurring right in front of me,” he naively wrote Selznick, who, in turn, was hurt and outraged at what was perceived as Kazan’s greedy high-handedness. The proposed arrangement would relegate the producer to being an observer with little part in the making of the show, a special affront to the Selznick hands-on producing tradition. Rather than agree to Kazan’s terms, Selznick offered to step aside. “I was not going to knuckle under, no good would come of it,” she said. “In time she would,” Kazan said, who knew Williams wanted only him to direct, “because she had to.”

  Elia Kazan

  Although Kazan would come to respect Selznick, during the rehearsal period he kept her at arm’s length. “I was rude,” he wrote. “I sometimes handled the lady with unnecessary crudeness.” Nonetheless, Selznick staunchly persevered. She hired Jo Mielziner to do the set design. “Tennessee went off his noodle with joy,” she wrote in a memo to her business partner. After two disappointing readings in New York with Margaret Sullavan and Pamela Brown, Selznick brought Williams to Los Angeles with Pancho in tow to see Jessica Tandy perform Williams’s first sketch of a doomed hysteric, “Miss
Lucretia Collins,” in his one-act Portrait of a Madonna. Kazan was also in town putting the finishing touches to Gentleman’s Agreement. “We all went to the show,” Kazan wrote of the Actors’ Lab production, which had been arranged by Tandy’s actor-husband Hume Cronyn. “And we were completely . . . taken with Jessie. She’d solved our most difficult problem in a flash.” Selznick was also quick to solve Williams’s personal problem. She parked Williams and Pancho on the estate of director George Cukor. “It has been a pretty fabulous time out here,” Williams wrote Windham, with no mention of his casting woes. “Have gone to some of the biggest parties and met all the big stars and Pancho says, ‘It’s like a dream come true!’ ” Williams went on, “It has put him in a wonderful humor and we have both gained about ten pounds so that we look like the big pig and the little pig.”

  But, as the Southern folk saying goes, the fattenin’ hog ain’t in luck. That summer, the Selznick office leaked to the press the big news that thirty-four-year-old John Garfield, one of the few sexy Hollywood stars with a proletarian pedigree, had signed on to play Stanley. The contract was drawn up on July 19, 1947, but it was never signed. The following two months of negotiations with Garfield would be, as Williams wrote to Audrey Wood, “about the biggest headache I’ve had in my theatrical experience—outside of Boston.” Garfield wanted a four-month limited-engagement run and a percentage of the play—an unprecedented demand at that time—as well as a guarantee of being cast in the film role, and certain artistic controls, including how many and where the curtains were to be and approval of the last-scene rewrite. Although Kazan claimed in his memoir not to be that keen on Garfield, who was a Group Theatre alumnus and his friend, Selznick’s memos indicate “much pressure from Greek headquarters.” “Kazan tried to persuade me to give it to him on the basis that I had plenty of money and all I wanted was a hit,” Selznick wrote to her business manager.

  Since she’d given Kazan such a large percentage of the manager’s share of the profit, Selznick offered to match any share of Kazan’s percentage he was willing to give up to secure Garfield. He declined. “I therefore had a final luncheon with Garfield either for a long-shot chance or a decent burial,” Selznick said. “He made me a sporting proposition.” She continued, “Garfield offered to take $1,500 a week against 10% of the gross for a brief period in order to prove his sincerity and at the same time to demonstrate to me his drawing power and the extent of his dramatic and artistic contribution to the show. He felt that after eight weeks in New York I would be willing to renegotiate the contract at terms more advantageous to him.” So the negotiations continued into August. With each passing day Williams grew more agitated. “I entered the agreement with Selznick because we were led to believe that we would have what we wanted in every respect and that there were great advantages to be derived from her management in casting due to her Hollywood connections,” he complained to Audrey Wood in August. “These advantages have not materialized.” He added, “It was bad management that announced Garfield in the papers before he was signed.”

  As the negotiations with Garfield reached crisis point, Selznick’s office was woefully aware of their deplorable position. In a five-page telegram to Selznick, her business manager Irving Schneider told her, “To lose him now means loss of prestige, difficult position with Music Box, bookings, Guild, and theater parties. To overcome these need replace him with name of similar caliber. The show can survive and come through without him but the immediate and near future effects are severely damning. If none of the above plans work . . . then must bring in Tennessee, Lieblings, Kazan to make the vital decision of whether to forego Garfield and face the consequences. Among those consequences incidentally is finding another good Stanley. We must close our eyes for the moment to the insult and injuries and reversals, avoid rehashing, take a deep breath, kiss the mezuzah and plunge.” Schneider added, “Gevalt seems too tame.”

  In the end, Garfield came up with yet another demand: if for any reason Kazan were to leave the show, he too would leave. “The Kazan clause” broke the camel’s back. On August 18, the deal collapsed. Selznick, feeling “low as a snake,” immediately starting turning over other Hollywood options. Richard Conte, Dane Clark, Cameron Mitchell, Gregory Peck, and Burt Lancaster were mooted. Signing “Pollyanna,” she wired Schneider:

  I HAVE GARFIELD-ITIS IN CHEST AND THROAT. OIVAY

  Then, on August 29, a name that didn’t appear on any of her extensive casting lists was being wired to Selznick at her Summit Avenue home in Beverly Hills: Marlon Brando.

  Brando, who was twenty-three years old, had appeared without much critical attention in five Broadway plays. He was a beautiful, brooding specimen: mercurial, rebellious, and rampant. Like Stanley, he was a ruthless man-child with reservoirs of tenderness and violence. A year before on Broadway in Maxwell Anderson’s Truckline Café, which Kazan co-produced and Harold Clurman directed, Brando stopped the show with a five-minute “murder monologue.” After his speech, the audience applauded for a full minute. “A minute on the stage is a long, long time,” Clurman, who had “never seen anything like it,” said. He added, “I don’t think he ever did anything better”—a judgment that could hardly be contradicted since Truckline Café lasted only thirteen performances. Nonetheless, another witness to Brando’s memorable ferocious psychic explosion, the critic Pauline Kael, thought to herself, “That boy’s having a convulsion! Then I realized he was acting.” Brando wasn’t trying to act, at least not in the hidebound acting tradition hitherto practiced on the American stage. “There was nothing you could do with Brando that touched what he could do with himself,” Kazan said. “In those days he was a genius. His own preparation for a scene, his own personality, armament, memories and desires were so deep that there was very little you had to do, except tell him what the scene was about.”

  Brando’s acting style was the performing equivalent of jazz. The notes were there, but Brando played them in a way that was uniquely personal to him. In his ability to call out of dialogue a heightened sense of emotional truth, the freedom of his stage behavior was mesmerizing and revolutionary. Instead of making everything learned and clear, Brando let the lines play on him and rode his emotions wherever they led him. “He even listened experientially,” Kazan said. “It’s as if you were playing on something. He didn’t look at you, and he hardly acknowledged what you were saying. He was tuned in to you without listening to you intellectually or mentally. It was a mysterious process. . . . There was always an element of surprise in what he did.” By turns charming, witty, wounded, cruel—Brando presented the public with an immediacy that seemed un-worked out; his reliance on impulse made him unpredictable and therefore dangerous. For both actor and audience the experience was a submersion in emotional contradiction. “There are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people,” Williams wrote to Kazan when negotiations with Selznick seemed to have broken down. “Nobody sees anybody truly, but all through the flaws of their own ego.” Brando incarnated this ambivalence and made it sensational.

  Over the years, as the legend of his performance as Stanley grew from its initial mixed critical response to what the New York Times in his obituary called “epochal,” many theatricals took credit for casting him. Audrey Wood claimed it was her husband William Liebling; with more justification, Kazan maintained it was him; Brando insisted that Harold Clurman planted the idea in Kazan’s head. “Gadg and Irene both said I was probably too young, and she was especially unenthusiastic about me,” Brando recalled in his autobiography. After pondering the script for a few days, even Brando called Kazan to decline the role. The part, he felt, was “a size too large.” “The line was busy,” Brando recalled later. “Had I spoken to him at that moment, I’m certain I wouldn’t have played the role. I decided to let it rest for a while and the next day he called me and said: ‘Well, what is it—yes or no?’ I gulped and said ‘Yes.’ ” To Kazan, Brando was “a shot in the dark”: now only Williams needed convincing. Kazan called Williams, gave Brando twenty dollars
, and sent him up to Provincetown to read. “That’s all I said,” Kazan recalled. “I waited. No return call. After three days I called Tennessee and asked him what he’d thought of the actor I’d sent him. ‘What actor?’ he asked. No one had showed up, so I figured I’d lost twenty bucks and began to look elsewhere.”

  Brando, who was broke, had decided to hitchhike with his girlfriend to Provincetown. When he finally arrived at Rancho Pancho around dusk in the last week of August, Brando walked into a scene of “domestic cataclysm,” according to Williams. The kitchen floor was flooded, the toilets were blocked, and the light fuse had blown. Like the blackout during the Wingfields’ supper, Williams and his houseguests were plunged “into everlasting darkness.” “It was all too much for Pancho,” Williams said. “He packed up and said he was going back to Eagle Pass. However he changed his mind, as usual.” To Williams, Brando was a spectacle of both beauty—“He was just about the best-looking young man I’ve ever seen”—and prowess. Brando fixed the lights, then unblocked the pipes. “You’d think he had spent his entire antecedent life repairing drains,” Williams said.

  An hour later, Brando finally got around to reading. He dismissed his girlfriend and sat in the corner of the clapboard house with Margo Jones, her friend Joanna Albus, and Williams, who cued him as Blanche. According to Williams, Brando read the script aloud “just as he played it.” “I was the antithesis of Stanley Kowalski,” Brando said. “I was sensitive by nature and he was coarse, a man with unerring animal instincts and intuition. . . . He was a compendium of my imagination, based on the lines of the play. I created him from Tennessee’s words.” Letting Williams’s words take him where they would and exuding the freedom of this approach, Brando was only ten minutes into his audition when Jones bolted from her chair with a whoop of delight. “Get Kazan on the phone! This is the greatest reading I’ve ever heard, in or outside of Texas!” she shouted. “A new value came out of Brando’s reading,” Williams wrote to Wood. “He seemed to have already created a dimensional character, of the sort that the war has produced among young veterans.” He added, “Please use all your influence to oppose any move on the part of Irene’s office to reconsider or delay signing the boy, in case she doesn’t take to him.”