Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

by John Lahr

  On the evening Brando read, after he had kvelled about him over the phone to Kazan, Williams recalled that Brando “smiled a little but didn’t show any particular elation.” Later, after dinner, Williams read some poetry, then they retired for the evening. “Things were so badly arranged that Margo and Brando had to sleep in the same room—on twin cots,” Williams wrote to Audrey Wood on August 29. “I believe they behaved themselves—the fools!” To Williams, Brando was “God-sent.” Brando seemed also to sense the immanence of some big thing. A great actor had met the great writer whose lyric power would release his genius. “When an actor has as good a play under him as Streetcar, he doesn’t have to do much,” Brando said. “His job is to get out of the way and let the part play itself.” This powerful alchemy produced in Brando a peculiar shyness when he was around the author. The morning after his audition Brando insisted that Williams walk up the beach with him. “And so we did—in silence,” Williams wrote. “And then we walked back—in silence.”

  BUT FOR PANCHO and Williams the rest of the summer was clamorous. The excitement of a new play was enough to exacerbate Pancho’s envy. The arrival into their world of a ravishing powerhouse like Brando, who would make a myth of a petulance that Pancho knew owed its inspiration to him, pushed him over the edge. Even before Pancho tried to run his “Torito” down, Williams sensed trouble brewing. “I am hoping he will go home, at least to New Orleans, until December,” he wrote to Wood at the end of August. “He is not a calm person. In spite of his temperamental difficulties he is very lovable and I have grown to depend on his affection and companionship but he is too capricious and excitable for New York especially when I have a play in rehearsal.” After the car incident, however, Pancho was sent packing—at least for a while. “It took some doing to get Pancho to leave,” Williams recalled. “Probably this phenomenal accomplishment was handled by Irene Selznick who has seldom found herself in a situation with which she couldn’t cope, not even the situation of releasing me from Pancho.”

  Williams returned—“quite gratefully so,” he wrote—to Manhattan on September 14 to work on rewrites prior to the beginning of rehearsals at the New Amsterdam Roof on October 6. Although there were over a hundred line changes during the rehearsal period, the most substantive revision was the ending and the final beats after Blanche is carted off to the madhouse. “There is still something too cut-and-dried in the necessary exposition between [Eunice and Stella],” Williams wrote to Selznick on September 8. In the original “Poker Night,” Stanley settles back down to a game of cards; outside, according to the stage directions, in front of the building “dim white against the fading dusk,” Stella rises from the steps and “elevates the child in her arms as if she were offering it to the tenderness of the sky. Then she draws it close to her and bows her head until her face is hidden by the child’s blanket.”

  In the final version, rewritten during the painful ructions with Pancho between September and October, Stella’s original isolated gesture of survival is turned into a much more powerful and ambivalent image—a sort of Renaissance pictorial grouping in which Stanley kneels at the feet of Stella, who holds their child on the stairway and sobs as his fingers open her blouse. “Now, now, love,” Stanley coos. “Now, love . . .” The scene demonstrates the couple’s preserving lie. In Streetcar, Stanley and Stella collude about Blanche’s rape. For the Kowalski family to continue, Blanche must be sacrificed. In Williams’s story, Pancho also had to be sacrificed so Williams’s life—his work, which was his baby—could go on. The aim of the play, he wrote to Kazan, was “fidelity”—a fidelity as much to his own heart as to his characters. “After this experience, I saw every play and every film I worked on as a confession, veiled or partly exposed, but always its author’s self revelation,” Kazan said. “Probably I would want him back,” Williams wrote to Donald Windham in March 1947, in a typical rationalization. “When we are alone he is usually sweet and amenable.” Williams spun the notion of Pancho into an acceptable fiction. “He needed me as much as I needed him,” Pancho said. “He knew that if we stayed together, we would destroy each other.”

  In October, while he was hymning the joys of the rehearsals to Margo Jones—“I cannot find words to tell you how wonderful Jessica and Gadg are, and what a superb combination their talents appear to be”—Williams was confiding loneliness to his notebooks. “Today I am particularly aware of missing Pancho.” He couldn’t be with Pancho, and he couldn’t let him go. “I wish I could write you an equally amusing letter but I don’t have any little nephews to supply me with comic material,” he wrote Pancho in October. “I feel very sober and dull. And when I get home at night, after a day at the disposal of the Selznick company and the Liebling-Wood Corporation, I barely have the strength to hit the typewriter keys. You must try and forgive me for being so stupid and do write me whenever you can. It does me good to hear about your peaceful family life in New Orleans where I would much prefer to be.” Williams ended on a maternal note: “Take care of yourself. Be good, be good, be good! And take your nephews to the zoo.”

  Around noon in mid-October, Williams’s writing was interrupted by a fierce pounding at his apartment door. “Reisito, Torito,” the voice outside shouted. Pancho was back. As usual he brought tumult with him. “Unable to break down the door, he jumped onto the cement sills of the gable windows,” Williams wrote in Memoirs. “I got to them just in time to lock them. A big crowd had gathered outside the brownstone by this time. Pancho was on the sill, hammering at the window until the glass split. Then a policeman intervened. He did not arrest Pancho but he ordered him away.” Williams went on, “Pancho looked back at me. His face was covered with tears. I started crying, too, a thing I very seldom do.”

  The tears spoke both of Williams’s love and of his regret. “I am terribly troubled. I don’t think I am acting kindly, and that is what I hate above all else,” he wrote Margo Jones about “the Mexican Problem.” To separate from Pancho meant losing a lover, a child, a family, and a sense of parental goodness. “He was like a father and brother to me,” Rodriguez said; in fact, on the evidence, Williams was more like a mother, trying to coax Pancho “to take a man’s place in the world.” Edwina Williams’s scolding voice was moralistic, manipulative, martyred; Williams didn’t like it and he didn’t want it around him. He tried to talk Edwina out of coming to the Streetcar opening. “This play is hardly your dish,” he wrote her, with the suggestion that she come to Summer and Smoke instead the following season. In the end Edwina would not be denied. Williams bowed to her wishes, but he warned her: “I shall not listen to any moral homilies and dissertations so please leave them at home.”

  In his dealings with Pancho, however, Williams’s maternal performance—liberal, measured, un-intrusive, forgiving—allowed Pancho to have the mother he never had. “Life is hard,” Williams wrote to Pancho in November 1947. “As Amanda said, ‘It calls for Spartan endurance.’ But more than that, it calls for understanding, one person understanding another person, and for some measure of sacrifice, too.” He went on, “I feel concerned for you, worried over your lack of purpose. You have so much more than I have in so many ways. Your youth, your health and energy, your many social graces which I do not have. Life can hold a great deal for you, it can be very rich and abundant if you are willing to make some effort and to stop thinking and acting altogether selfishly. In this world the key to happiness is giving, more than getting.” The paternal voice was harder for Williams to muster; he didn’t know how to be properly assertive or how to lay down the law. After the hurly-burly of Pancho’s rambunctious reentry into his life, Williams claimed in Memoirs that he took refuge in a hotel, where he stayed until Pancho “had been persuaded that I could not be induced to resume residence with him or willingly see him again.” In fact, Williams couldn’t bring himself to break so cleanly. For a while, Pancho moved back in with him.

  By the time Williams saw his rewritten last scene mounted for the first time in rehearsal, he was once again, like
his characters, colluding in the preserving lie of relationship. “My feeling for P. has more or less definitely fallen from desire to custom though my affection is not lost,” he wrote on October 27 in his notebook. “I don’t think it was time or repetition. It was partly that but other things, a spiritual disappointment, was the more important factor.” Williams continued, “He is incapable of reason. Violence belongs to his nature as completely as it is abhorrent to mine. Most of all, I want and now must have—simple peace. The problem is to act kindly and still strongly; for now I know that my manhood is sacrificed in submitting to such a relationship. Oh well—it will work out somehow.”

  On October 30, at Streetcar’s first-night tryout in New Haven, far from being Williams’s “ex-valiant ex-companion,” Pancho had the seat of honor beside Williams in a row that included Kazan, Selznick, Cole Porter, and Thornton Wilder. Later, at a party, Wilder complained that an aristocrat like Stella would never have fallen for a vulgarian like Stanley. “I thought, privately, this character has never had a good lay,” Williams said. Wilder also opined that Blanche was too complex. “But people are complex, Thorn,” Williams said.

  For sexual and emotional complexity, nothing on stage approached Williams and Pancho off it. At the New Haven opening, the crowd adored Brando—“a performance miracle in the making,” according to Kazan. His characterization of Stanley was so strong that it threatened to overpower Tandy and to throw the play off kilter. “Because it was out of balance, people laughed at me at several points in the play, turning Blanche into a foolish character,” Brando recalled. “I didn’t try to make Stanley funny. People simply laughed, and Jessica was furious because of this, so angry that she asked Gadg to fix it somehow, which he never did. I saw a flash of resentment in her every time the audience laughed at me. She really disliked me for it.” Kazan was worried. “I looked to my authority, Tennessee,” he said. “He was no help, he seemed enraptured by the boy. ‘The son of a bitch is riding a crush,’ I said to myself.”

  Flanked by Irene Selznick and Elia Kazan on the set of A Streetcar Named Desire

  “If Tennessee was Blanche, Pancho was Stanley,” Kazan said. He went on, “Wasn’t he attracted to the Stanleys of the world? Sailors? Rough trade? Danger itself? Yes, and wilder. The violence in that boy, always on a trigger edge, attracted Williams at the very time it frightened him.” In Kazan’s analysis, Blanche “is attracted to a murderer, Stanley. . . . That’s the source of ambivalence in the play. Blanche wants the very thing that’s going to crush her. The only way she can deal with this threatening force is to give herself to it. . . . That’s the way Williams was. He was attracted to trash—rough, male homosexuals who were threatening him. . . . Part of the sexuality that Williams wrote into the play is the menace of it.”

  Even as Kazan worked to get this sense of sexual menace on stage; off it, he saw Williams living the threat. In Boston, during the tryout between November 3 and 15, Kazan and Williams stayed at the Ritz-Carlton on the same floor. One night, coming from Williams’s room, Kazan heard a “fearsome commotion . . . curses in Spanish, threats to kill, the sound of breaking china (a large vase smashed) and a crash (the ornamental light fixture in the center of the room torn down).” Kazan continued, “As I rushed out into the corridor, Tennessee burst through his door, looking terrified, and dashed into my room. Pancho followed, but when I blocked my door, he turned to the elevator, still cursing, and was gone. Tennessee slept on the twin bed in my room that night. The next morning . . . we heard Pancho returning, and Williams went back into his suite. He didn’t look frightened, dismayed or disapproving, but happy that Pancho was back and eager to see the man who’d made such a terrible scene the night before.”

  “I left New York two or three weeks before the play opened,” Rodriguez recalled, whose hotel escapade proved the last straw. “Tennessee felt that I would be better at home. We would get together after the play opened. He promised me that, but he never came back.” Even though Pancho had packed many bags and made many dramatic exits—“I used to try and hurt him by telling him that he was uncouth and unmannered, and that he should be with Rose in an institution,” Pancho said—gratitude dominated regret in Williams’s final elegiac farewell:

  . . . I have never said an untrue thing to you all the times that I have been with you except in those few blind panicky moments when it seemed, perhaps unreasonably, that you had never cared for me at all and that I had been just a matter of convenience for whom you held contempt. To explain those things you have to go back through the entire history of a life, all its loneliness, its disappointments, its hunger for understanding and love. No, there is no point in talking about it any further. I don’t ask anything of you, Pancho, this is not to ask anything, not even your pardon. I only want to tell you that I am your friend and will remain so regardless of how you may feel toward me. I offered you more of my heart than I have anybody in the last five years, which you may not have wanted and may now despise but believe me it is still full of the truest affection for you. Wherever you are I want you to have happiness.—salud amor y pesados!

  To the end of his days, Rodriguez clung to a sentence from Williams’s valedictory note. “I knew that he loved me as much as I loved him,” Rodriguez said. “He wrote me a letter saying that ‘no one suffers alone’.” Williams’s letter tried to see both of them clearly; it imposed the kind of humane detachment with which he’d written Streetcar, “as if a ghost sat over the affairs of men and made a true record.” “When you see that someone needs peace more than anything else, needs quietness and a sense of security, you cannot expect to involve that person in continual turmoil and tension and anxiety and still have him cherishing your companionship all the time,” Williams wrote Pancho, cutting him loose. He continued, “No, for his own protection if he wishes to go on living and working, he must withdraw sometime from these exhausting conditions. One does not suffer alone. It is nearly always two who suffer, but sometimes one places all the blame on the other. . . . You know that my affection for you and my loyalty to you as a friend remain unalterable and that while I am alive you will have my true friendship always with you.”

  BY THE TIME Streetcar moved to Philadelphia and its last out-of-town tryout, most of the hurdles that had caused Kazan initial anxiety had been cleared. Tandy had risen to the challenge of Brando’s performance; Brando had deepened his role as much from his observation of the director—his posture, his glances, his swagger—as from his notes. He had psyched out Kazan, who in his Streetcar journal at least noted a parallel in their psyches: “Stanley (M.B.) like E.K. is self absorbed to the point of fascination.” Even Kim Hunter, who played Stella and who Williams worried was “the lame duck in the line-up,” raised her game. Selznick, despite her occasional jejune gesture, like handing Kazan pages of single-spaced typewritten notes, over time won his grudging affection. Privately, Kazan told Williams that the show smelled like a hit; to the cast and crew, however, he played down the buzz. “What we’ve got here is oysters. Not everyone has a taste for oysters. Just do the play and hope for the best,” Kazan told his cast before the New York opening. In his first-night telegram to Brando, Williams began:

  RIDE OUT BOY AND SEND IT SOLID . . .

  “Streetcar opened last night to tumultuous approval,” Williams wrote to his publisher James Laughlin on December 4, 1947. “Never witnessed such an exciting evening. So much better than New Haven you wouldn’t believe it; N.H. was just a reading of the play. Much more warmth, range, intelligence, interpretation, etc.—a lot of it because of better details in direction, timing.” Williams gushed on, “Packed house, of the usual first-night decorations—Cecil Beaton, Valentina, D. Parker, the Selznicks, the others and so on—and with a slow warm-up for first act, and comments like ‘Well, of course, it isn’t a play,’ the second act (it’s in 3 now) sent the audience zowing to mad heights, and the final one left them—and me—wilted, gasping, weak, befoozled, drained (see reviews for more words) and then an uproar of applause which wen
t on and on. Almost no one rose from a seat till many curtains went up on the whole cast, the 4 principles, then Tandy, who was greeted by a great howl of ‘Bravo!’ from truly all over the house. Then repeat of the whole curtain schedule to Tandy again and finally . . . . . . . . . . 10 Wms crept on stage, after calls for Author! and took bows with Tandy. All was great, great, GREAT!”

  Streetcar, as Arthur Miller said, planted “the flag of beauty on the shores of commercial theatre.” Miller added, “The play cannot be disparaged.” Nonetheless, in the first wave of reviews, some tried. George Jean Nathan, for instance, dubbed Williams a “Southern genital-man.” “The play might well have been titled ‘The Glans Menagerie,’ ” he quipped in his review. Among the play’s many narrative sensations was the first sighting on the American stage of a sexual male. “In 1947, when Marlon Brando appeared on stage in a torn sweaty T-shirt, there was an earthquake,” Gore Vidal wrote. Vidal also contended that “Stanley Kowalski changed the concept of sex in America. Before him, no male was considered erotic. Some were handsomer than others, some had charm. A man was essentially a suit, he wasn’t a body.” Vidal went on, “Johnny Weissmuller would have been the closest thing, and he was basically sort of androgynous looking. His body had no sex attached to it, whereas Marlon played with his cock onstage and that excited people. The mutation was the Williams effect. The male is his obsession, and male sexuality the benchmark. Females are principal characters in his plays because it’s through them that you’re going to view the male, which is the playwright’s objective.”