Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

by John Lahr

  Strange things were happening in the rest of the country as well. In Indiana, wrestlers were required to sign loyalty oaths; in Ohio, Communists were declared ineligible for unemployment benefits; in Tennessee, anyone seeking to overthrow the state government faced a death penalty. The crusade for conformity extended to the gay world, with its perceived subversive and “degenerate” power. (The press dubbed what it saw as a cabal of powerful gay artists working to undermine the moral fiber of American life “the Homintern”—an invocation of the Soviet-sponsored Comintern.) In D.C., the police set up a special unit of the vice squad “to investigate links between homosexuality and Communism.” “I would not say that every homosexual is a subversive,” Nebraskan Senator Kenneth Wherry said in 1950. “And I would not say that every subversive is a homosexual. But a man of low morality is a menace in government, whatever he is, and they are all tied up together.” Other senators were not so politic. “If you want to be against McCarthy, boys, you’ve got to be a Communist or a cocksucker,” Senator Joseph McCarthy, the browbeating figurehead of the nation’s reactionary delirium, told reporters. “The anti-fag battalions were everywhere on the march,” Vidal explained. “From the high lands of Partisan Review to the middle ground of Time magazine, envenomed attacks on real or suspected fags never let up.”

  But it was in the swamps of the tabloid press that the bigotry festered. Walter Winchell, in his popular columns, for instance, regularly referred to “limp-wristers” and “whoopseys”; another Broadway pundit, Dorothy Kilgallen, declared it “time for TV to switch from switch-hitters.” In 1951, Washington Confidential broadcast fears of America being “feminized”; the corruption, it gleefully reported, extended to the U.S. government, “more than 90 twisted twerps in trousers had been swished out of the State Department.” (Even Alfred Kinsey, who wrote Williams after publishing his pioneering Kinsey Report, which lifted the lid off the hypocrisy of American sexual practices, couldn’t bring himself to write the word “homosexual.” According to David Halberstam, Kinsey “was prudish enough to keep the interviews that his staff did on homosexuality under a file that was known as the H-histories.”) Homophobia extended even to such popular New York watering holes as the Plaza’s Oak Room and P.J. Clarke’s, which discouraged gay patronage by allowing at the bar only men who were escorting women.

  This public mood so infected Key West that Williams contemplated selling his first, and only, home. “Fortunately property values are thought to be increasing,” he told Crawford. “Although I paid too much for this house, I may be able to get rid of it without much loss—if the present atmosphere continues, which I suppose it is bound to do, or even increase—in the event of a war.” Still, he clung to his identity as an outsider. Soon after returning from the opening of The Rose Tattoo, he packed off his mother and Dakin to St. Louis. He joked to a friend, “You can’t run a Puritan and a Bohemian household under a single roof and expect the roof to stay on.”

  A few months later, after Atkinson had noted with pleasure, in his follow-up piece on The Rose Tattoo, the elimination of a controversial moment from the production in which Mangiacavallo accidentally drops a condom on the floor, Williams wrote to Atkinson about “the unmentionable article.” “I would have removed it at once if it had not, somehow, failed to strike me as being at all vulgar, even though I knew it seemed that way to many people,” he said, adding, “Bohemianism seems to take such a strong hold on someone from a background so intensely Puritanical as mine was, once it is broken away from. Then I am always wanting to say and do things in a play that are not ordinarily done, to make it closer to common experience, to prove, at least to myself, that there is nothing in experience that cannot be admitted to writing.” In a subsequent letter to Atkinson, an exercise in special pleading written in April 1953, Williams returned to the theme of bohemianism, though now with a hint of hysteria brought on by the vicious and vituperative times he’d endured in the interim:

  I must tell you that I have lived in “the lower depths,” which are a large strata of society, have fought my way only partially up out of them, and my work is a record of what I have seen, heard, felt and known on the way. I have known intimately a world haunted by frustrated and dreadful longings. (“Keen for him, all maimed creatures, deformed and mutilated! His homeless ghost is your own!”) I have even spent nights in southern jails—wrist handcuffed to ankle and made to crawl—and seen negro women kicked and bludgeoned up and downstairs because the circumstances of their lives had turned them to prostitution, I have lived intimately with the outcast and derelict and the desperate and found in them the longing, passionate, and bravely enduring, and, most of all, the tender. I have tried to make a record of their lives because my own has fitted me to do so. And I feel that each artist is sort of bound by honor to be the voice of that part of the world that he knows.

  With Paul Bigelow and the fleet

  Williams’s letter to Atkinson, like his dramatic writing, was a calculated seduction, a way of using his heightened suffering to capture the imagination of the other. (“I have probably exhausted your patience now,” he signed off. “But I hope I have not yet forfeited your friendship!?”) For the hidebound section of the American community that feared contamination and clung to the bedtime stories being peddled in popular entertainment, the psychic romance of Williams’s plays was viewed as a poisoned chalice.

  WHILE WILLIAMS TRIED to cut down on both his drinking and his work routine in the Florida sun, the making of the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire brought into even bolder relief the battle that was being fought over America’s cultural narrative. Hollywood had reinvented America as Superbia—a God-fearing, family-oriented land of blessing, where right and wrong were clear, progress was certain, and goodness prevailed. Williams’s sense of moral order was not so doctrinaire. In his worldview, life couldn’t always be repaired or people redeemed. He considered himself a romantic pessimist; optimism was not part of his narrative bargain. (When asked once about the secret of happiness, Williams answered, “Insensitivity, I guess.”) With its complex view of human appetite and its pessimistic view of human nature, Streetcar challenged received opinion; inevitably, it forced out into the open the reactionary views of the power elite.

  In 1934, in the name of civic responsibility, Hollywood created a Production Code Administration (PCA), headed by Joseph Ignatius Breen, through which the industry imposed its own unofficial form of censorship. Williams had his first skirmish with the PCA over the final cut of The Glass Menagerie. Breen’s office suggested that Tom’s last, elegiac lines—“Oh Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!”—implied incest and should be cut. In a rage, Williams wrote to the film’s producers about “the foul-minded and utterly stupid tyranny” of the PCA. “The charge is insulting to me, to my family, and an effrontery to the motion-picture industry!” he railed. “I think you owe it to motion-pictures to defend yourselves against such prurience . . . by fighting it out with them.” Williams added, “If I ever work in pictures, in America, I must know that my work is not at the mercy of the capricious whims that seem to operate in this office.”

  Now, the PCA rose again. As the epigram from Hart Crane announced, Streetcar’s ambition was “to trace the visionary company of love”; its truth was uncompromising and complex. The Breen office’s self-proclaimed mission was to serve public taste, not truth, to ensure that “correct standards of life” were represented on the screen. “The stage got a shock from Tennessee Williams. We got twice the shock,” Breen’s assistant Geoffrey Shurlock said. From the outset, Kazan and Williams had thrown down the gauntlet. Kazan had been particularly combative. On April 27, 1950, he told the PCA operative Jack Vizzard, who thought the script “sordid and morbid,” that “this story and this script are completely moral. . . . It ran two years and family after family came to see it.” Unpersuaded and undaunted, the next day the PCA issued a report that outlined three problem areas: the “sex perversion”
in regard to Allan Grey, whose discovery in flagrante and subsequent suicide haunt Blanche; Blanche’s sexual avidity; and Stanley’s rape of Blanche.

  Williams spent a fortnight in Hollywood, at six thousand dollars a week, revising the screenplay, but the concessions he made were not enough. The primary sticking point was the rape scene. The PCA was prepared to let the implication of rape stand and to allow Blanche to sink into dementia afterward, but required that Stanley vigorously denounce the charge and prove his innocence. “The device by which he proves himself is yet to be invented,” the PCA acknowledged. Jack Vizzard contacted both Williams and Kazan by phone to inform them of the PCA’s conclusions. “The results were highly unsatisfactory,” Vizzard reported. “Mr. Williams actually signed off in a great huff, declaiming that he did not need the money that much, and Mr. Kazan had to continue the second telephone call with a little more sobriety and temperateness than the writer.”

  In late May 1950, during a meeting at Warner Brothers with Joseph Breen in attendance, both Kazan and Williams threatened to quit if the rape scene was cut. “I only want to do this script if it can be done honestly and I don’t want to do another story or a different story,” Kazan said, according to notes taken at the meeting. “We think it has things which are pure and moral and are the very essence of the story and we have no intention of [making the cuts]. We will stop right here,” he added, before storming out with Williams. The argument had not been resolved by the time the scene was scheduled to be shot in early October 1950. Kazan told the PCA that he would improvise a solution on the set. “If Mr. Kazan’s solution was one of those fence-straddling devices which would let the scene be interpreted either way—either as a rape, or not—it probably would not be satisfactory,” Vizzard told Breen, according to a written record of their conversation. “If protection shots were going to be taken, one should be made which would prove affirmatively, by any device they wished to invent, that a rape did not take place.” As R. Barton Palmer and William Robert Bray wrote in Hollywood’s Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America, “In effect, Breen was asking Kazan and Williams not only to modify but to reject explicitly in the film version, the scene that, more than any other, had made the Broadway play a notorious, national sensation.”

  The brinksmanship continued throughout the shooting of the picture and into its editing. On October 29, 1950, Williams petitioned Breen directly by letter: “The rape of Blanche by Stanley is a pivotal, integral truth in the play, without which the play loses its meaning, which is the ravishment of the tender, the sensitive, the delicate by the savage and brutal forces in modern society. . . . ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ is one of the truly great American films and one of the very few really moral films that have come out of Hollywood. To mutilate it, now, by forcing, or attempting to force, disastrous alterations in the essential truth of it would serve no good end that I can imagine.” Williams went on, “When we have our backs against the wall—if we are forced into that position—none of us is going to throw in the towel!”

  In the end, through the judicious use of close-ups, crosscut images of a shattered mirror, and a fire hose gushing water, the film conveyed the idea of rape without actually showing it. Kazan preserved Williams’s poetry and his sensationalism; he saw this act of conversion as a commercial victory. “The thing that makes this piece great box office is that it has two things,” he wrote to Jack Warner while completing the final edit in early 1951. “1) It is about the three F’s. 2) It has class. No person who tries to keep in any kind of step can afford to miss it. Both are equally important. What made it a Pulitzer Prize winner—the poetry—must be kept in, untouched so that it will appeal to those who don’t want to admit that they are interested in the moist seat department. (Everybody, of course, is!)” He concluded, “This is the only picture I ever made that I’m completely proud of.”

  Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh on the Hollywood set of A Streetcar Named Desire

  The Breen office may have lost the battle; in an essential way, however, it won the war. In exchange for allowing the rape, Breen got agreement that “Stanley would be ‘punished’ and that punishment would be in terms of his loss of his wife’s love. In other words, that there would be a strong indication that she would leave him.” The bulk of Williams’s story was preserved; the meaning of Streetcar’s ending was not. In the play, Stanley lies to Stella about the rape, and she decides to believe him. Blanche is sacrificed to the continuity of Stanley and Stella’s sexual and family life. This preserving lie, and their collusion in it, is embodied in Streetcar’s final image, in which Stanley sits on the stairs beside Stella, who holds their child and sobs. “Now, honey. Now, love. Now, now, love,” Stanley says, “voluptuously, soothingly” as his fingers unbutton her blouse. “The luxurious sobbing, the sensual murmur fade away under the swelling music of the ‘blue piano’ and the muted trumpet,” the stage directions read. As the image of the Kowalskis’ kingdom of self fades out, Stanley’s poker-playing friends fade in. The play’s last words—“This game is seven-card stud”—underscore its sexual ruthlessness. The game of life goes on at all cost; the driving force of passion includes a passion for denial. In the finale of the film, however, righteousness replaces selfishness, and the anarchy of desire is banished. “Don’t you touch me,” Stella says to Stanley, “shrinking from him,” as she goes back to where her baby lies in his carriage. As Stanley yells her name, according to the screenplay, “Stella looks down at the infant. Crying, she whispers to the child these words of promise and reassurance:

  STELLA: We’re not going back in there. Not this time. We’re never going back. Never, never back, never back again.

  And then Stella turns and proceeds with strength and confidence up the stairs to Eunice’s apartment.

  Although this change ensured the PCA’s rating of “acceptable,” the Legion of Decency, a Catholic watchdog organization, whose self-proclaimed concern was “the primacy of moral order” but which had no statutory rights of censorship, objected to something much thornier and more fundamental in Williams’s play: the erotic charge of the flesh. The sizzle of Stanley and Stella’s coupling, not the brutality meted out to Blanche, was what threatened Streetcar with the Legion’s C (Condemned) rating. “Joe, a very strange thing has happened,” Vizzard wrote to Breen, after being tipped off about the Legion’s complaints. “In concentration on our two leading characters, with whom most of the problems lay, we completely missed what this bastard Kazan was doing with Stella . . . the lustful and carnal scoring they introduced into the final print underscores and highlights what were mere subtleties and suggestions in a way I never thought possible.” He continued, “The result is to throw into sharp relief in the finished film the purely lustful relationship between Stella and Stanley, that creates a totally different impression from the one we got when we saw it. . . . It makes it a story about sex—sex desire specifically—and this is the quintessence of the objection by the Legion.”

  Warner Brothers panicked. At the rumor of the Legion’s disapproval, Radio City Music Hall canceled Streetcar’s grand opening. The studio imagined pickets, yearlong boycotts, and priests stationed in lobbies taking the names of parishioners who attended. “When you speak of the primacy of moral values, my only question is: WHOSE?” Kazan wrote to the Legion’s spokesman, Martin Quigley, in August 1951, a month before the film’s release. “My only objection is to a situation in which, regardless of motive, the effect is the imposition of the values of one group of our population upon the rest of us. This limits one of our fundamental American rights: freedom of expression.” Kazan added, “This, to my way of thinking, is immoral.” Quigley, who was an editor of a motion-picture trade paper and a Catholic with strong personal ties to Cardinal Francis Spellman, the Archbishop of New York, fired back, “You asked whose moral values I am talking about. I refer to the long-prevailing standards of morality of the Western World, based on the Ten Commandments—nothing, you see, that I can boast of inventing or dreaming up.
. . . I have the same right to say that the moral consideration has a right of precedence over the artistic consideration as you have to deny it.”

  In an attempt to do an end run around the Legion of Decency, Kazan made a proposal to Jack Warner. Since the Legion had publicly argued that it was imposing its rating only for the protection of its flock, Kazan argued that the studio “should take them at their word.” His idea was to open Streetcar in two different New York theaters: one showing the “condemned version” for the general public and the other showing an approved Legion of Decency version for Catholic audiences. “Think about it. Aside from everything else, I think it is great showmanship,” Kazan wrote to his boss. “I even think some Catholics might sneak in to see the condemned version. I think it would gain you and your organization the respect of 98% of this country, including most of the Catholics. . . . I was brought up a Catholic in New Rochelle, New York, went to catechism school for two years, and am very intimately acquainted with nuns and priests. Believe me, they like everybody else despise no one so much as the people who knuckle under to them. In that respect they are only human.”

  Nothing came of Kazan’s suggestion, however. Instead, a week before the film’s opening, on September 18, 1951, without informing Kazan, Jack Warner dispatched a film editor to New York to carry out twelve cuts suggested by the Legion, which amounted to four minutes of film. “They range from a trivial cut of three words ‘on the mouth’ (following the words ‘I would like to kiss you softly and sweetly’) to a re-cutting of the wordless scene in which Stella, played by Kim Hunter, comes down a stairway to Stanley after a quarrel,” Kazan wrote in an article on the subject in the New York Times. “This scene was carefully worked out in an alternation of close and medium shots, to show Stella’s conflicting revulsion and attraction to her husband and Miss Hunter played it beautifully. The censored version protects the audience from the close shots and substitutes a long shot of her descent. It also, by explicit instruction, omits a wonderful piece of music. It was explained to me that both the close shots and the music made the girl’s relation to her husband ‘too carnal.’ ” Kazan continued, “Another cut comes directly before Stanley attacks Blanche. It takes out his line, ‘You know, you might not be bad to interfere with.’ Apart from forcing a rather jerky transition, this removes the clear implication that only here, for the first time, does Stanley have any idea of harming the girl. This obviously changes the interpretation of the character, but how it serves the cause of morality is obscure to me, though I have given it much thought.”