by John Lahr
His feverish internal debate—between the dead heart and the outcrying heart—was built into the early structure of the script, which laid out the battle between the despondent, alcoholic Brick, son of Big Daddy Pollitt, “the Delta’s biggest cotton-planter,” and his beautiful, frustrated wife, Maggie, who wants both her husband’s love and an heir to claim her dying father-in-law’s wealth. “In this version, if you had a scene between Brick and Maggie, the first scene would be written from Brick’s point of view,” Wood recalled. “Then you’d turn a page and there would be the same scene from Maggie’s point of view. Page after page it went on.” Williams came to understand the play as “a synthesis of all my life.” In Brick and Maggie’s battle, Williams projected the war inside himself between self-destruction and creativity—his desire to reclaim his literary inheritance.
Brick, on crutches—he has broken an ankle in a drunken attempt to relive his glory days as a high-school athlete—is literally and metaphorically hobbled by his melancholy. He is, as his name indicates, inert. His life is the living death of resignation; he has thrown in the towel. Brick is not only blocked; he is a charming, laidback refusenik who stonewalls the world with drink, cutting himself off from fear, loathing, and life. “A man can be scared and calm at the same time,” Williams had noted in the New Orleans hospital. Brick personifies this infuriating passivity: he makes himself blank to his own desires. His deepest psychic relationship is with alcohol, which serves as a kind of mother, to nourish, calm, and contain him. “This click that I get in my head that makes me peaceful, I got to drink till I get it,” he explains to his father, Big Daddy. “It’s just a mechanical thing, something like a—like a—like a—switch clicking off in my head, turning the hot light off and the cool night on and—all of a sudden there’s—peace!”
With British theater critic Kenneth Tynan at a festival in Valencia, Spain
Brick is a monument to absence. He enacts onstage the same tactics that Williams did in life: he is compelling enough for other people to want to help him, but he never actually changes. His behavior inspires concern, but he feels concern for no one. His indifference is perverse. He externalizes the inner world of the hysteric—what Masud Khan calls “a cemetery of refusals”—in which the most sensational is his refusal to bed his beautiful wife. Maggie’s goal throughout the play is to coax Brick back between the sheets, but, as far as he’s concerned, Maggie the Cat can jump off that roof and take up with someone else who will satisfy her sexually.
Maggie, by contrast, is all combat: her hat, as she says, is in the ring, and she’s determined to win. She wants Brick; she wants life; she wants, especially, to create a new life with Brick. “Born poor, raised poor, expect to die poor unless I manage to get us something out of what Big Daddy leaves when he dies of cancer,” she confesses to Brick, who blames her for the death of Skipper, his beloved friend and former football teammate. As Brick lashes out at Maggie, just missing her with swipes of his crutch, she forces him to face the truth: “Skipper is dead! I’m alive! Maggie the cat is—alive! I am alive, alive! I am alive!” She can still make a baby, she tells him; they can still claim their inheritance. “But how in hell on earth do you imagine—that you’re going to have a child by a man that can’t stand you?” Brick says. “That’s a problem I will have to work out,” Maggie replies.
“Did Brick love Maggie?” Williams wrote in a subsequent defense of his characters. “He says with unmistakable conviction: ‘One man has one great good true thing in his life, one great good thing which is true. I had friendship with Skipper, not love with you, Maggie, but friendship with Skipper . . .’—But can we doubt that he was warmed and charmed by this delightful girl, with her vivacity, her humor, her very admirable pluckiness and tenacity, which are almost the essence of life itself? Of course, now that he has really resigned from life, retired from competition, removed his hat from the ring, now that he wants only things that are cool, such as his ‘click’ and cool moonlight on the gallery and the deadening of recollection that liquor gives, her tormented face, her anxious voice, strident with the heat of combat, is unpleasantly, sometimes even odiously, disturbing to him. But Brick’s overt sexual adjustment was, and must always remain, a heterosexual one. . . . He is her dependent.”
Through Maggie, Williams gave a voice to his own imminent emotional atrophy. “I’ve gone through this—hideous!—transformation, become—hard! Frantic!—cruel!!” she tells Brick in the first minutes of the play. For Williams to keep his heart open, he had to lacerate it. “I never could keep my finger off a sore,” Maggie says. Neither could Williams. Writing to Crawford in June 1954 (and, incidentally, asking her to recommend a stateside psychoanalyst for when he returned), Williams noted, “There is torment in this play, violence and horror—it is the under kingdom, all right!—that reflects what I was going through, or approaching, as I wrote it.” He added, “Perhaps if I had not been so tormented myself it would have been less authentic. Because I could not work with the old vitality, I had to find new ways and may have found some.”
Rather like an actor who stays in character offstage in order not to lose the reality of his performance, Williams had begun to intuit the utility of his masochism, to become a connoisseur of his own collapse. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, his friend Donald Windham correctly sussed a sea change in his writing; he called it a shift from self-dramatization to self-justification. “I’m not sure self-pity is the right term,” Williams wrote to Time critic Ted Kalem, who had come to the same conclusion as Windham. “In the case of the ‘highly personal’ writer, I wonder if ‘self-examination’ isn’t a more accurate way to put it. Does this make sense to you?” In fact, the shift in Williams was to self-cannibalization. He was prepared to destroy himself for meaning. He took himself right up to the precipice, so that he could stare into it.
While Williams was creating a drama around Brick’s permanent state of inebriation, he, too, had formed an unrepentant appetite for what he jauntily called “a drinky-pie”:
When you’re feelin sorry
when you start to sigh,
honey, what you’re needin
is a little drinky-pie.
Yes, honey, what you’re cravin
is a little drinky-pie.
Two or three ain’t nothin,
three or four won’t make you high,
but the fifth drink is the number
that I call a drinky-pie!
. . . You’ll bust the sky wide open
with a little drinky-pie.
Drink a little drinky-pie, love,
drink a little drinky-pie
Such anthems aside, Williams’s drinking was no laughing matter. “It has gotten so bad,” he admitted to Crawford, “I don’t dare to turn down a street unless I can sight a bar not more than a block and a half down it.” He added, “Sometimes I have to stop and lean against a wall and ask somebody with me to run ahead and bring me a glass of cognac from the bar.” Williams was becoming simultaneously an actor and a voyeur, an exhibitionist and a spectator of his own suffering. He was scaring himself into new literary life.
“FOR THE NEW YEAR: may you write a play and may I direct it,” Elia Kazan had written Williams on Christmas Day, 1953. Seven months later, Williams granted Kazan his wish. In July, Wood sent him Orpheus Descending; by mid-August, Kazan declared his enthusiasm, dangling the possibility of a December production. “Of course I wrote it for you as I have all of my plays since ‘Streetcar’ but I had little hope that you would have the time or want to do it, probably as a result of Cheryl [Crawford]’s discouraging reaction,” Williams replied, while reminding Kazan that another director, Joe Mankiewicz, was also in the hunt. He went on:
Of course you know, as I’ve already told you, that I’d never give the play to Joe (assuming he still wants it) except in the unlikely event that there is an irreconcilable difference in your point of view and mine. I’ve never resisted any changes in work that you suggested for any reason except a real inability to make th
em, never because I didn’t understand or approve of them. Sometimes you specify sweeping changes which would involve a sort of re-write that would occupy months of time, at my slower and slower pace of working. I’d hate to have to compute the amount of time I’ve already devoted to this re-write of “Battle”: it would shock you!—and I just couldn’t embark upon another very extensive revision of it, especially with two new plays in first draft which I think should now take precedence, although neither of them has, in my opinion, the potential stature of this one, but do have the advantage of complete newness. I believe Audrey feels the fact that this play is based on an old one would weigh against it critically. This may be true. But I feel that if it’s powerful enough, as it surely would be in your hands, with the right cast, that disadvantage would be annihilated and even almost forgotten before it passed Philadelphia, because what they want is a good play, or a strong one, new or old.
In September, two weeks before his return from Europe, Williams wrote to Kazan again; in pencil, at the top of the letter, he scrawled, “Will return with 2 other plays besides ‘Orpheus,’ no lie!”
One of those plays was Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. When Williams had first shown the short version to Wood in Rome, he had floated the idea that it be part of a double bill. Wood was adamantly opposed. “I still wish it could be a full evening,” she wrote to him in July, “and I’m still troubled by your desire to keep it in a length that will necessitate adding something alien to it.” Wood felt the play was unfinished, but her idea challenged Williams’s poetic conception of the play. He remained intransigent. “To me the story is complete in its present form, it says all that I had to say about these characters and their situation, it was conceived as a short full-length play: there are three acts in it. First, Brick and his wife. Second, Brick and Big Daddy. Third, The Family Conference,” Williams wrote to Wood in September. “I thought at least structurally the play was just right, I liked there being no time lapse between the acts, one flowing directly into the others, and it all taking place in the exact time that it occupies in the theatre. I would hate to lose that tightness, that simplicity, by somehow forcing it into a more extended form simply to satisfy a convention of theatre.”
Williams could straight-arm Wood with palaver about his artistic intentions; Kazan, however, was a cagier customer. At the prospect of getting his hands on a new Williams play, even before he’d seen it, Kazan passed on Orpheus Descending. “I’m quite exhausted. Out of gas. No gissum left,” Kazan said, suggesting that Williams go with Mankiewicz and he would “wait for one of the new plays.”
On September 30, accompanied on the Andrea Doria by Anna Magnani on her way to Hollywood to film The Rose Tattoo, Williams and Merlo docked in New York. Two weeks later, production plans for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof were already being formulated, with Wood and Kazan “both hot for it,” according to Williams. “The only thing I want is Kazan,” Williams wrote to Maria Britneva on October 17.
With two consecutive Broadway financial failures to his name, Williams needed a hit, and Kazan was a hit-maker. Before Kazan read Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Williams wrote him a well-judged letter, and in it played both to his sense of friendship and to his artistic ambition. “You are on the threshold of your richest creative period. There were unmistakable signs of this in ‘Waterfront’ and in ‘Tea and Sympathy,’ ” Williams wrote. “In both cases you triumphed over scripts which I personally don’t care for and invested them with values without which they would have been red caviar: I mean salmon roe, not shad. All you need now is a thing that can rise when you rise, with the same sort of lift that you give it, and I am still hoping that something of mine will be it. I even dare to believe so!”
“I’ve occasionally lied to playwrights when they’ve offered me a play to direct that I’ve liked but with qualifications that were negative,” Kazan wrote in his autobiography. After reading Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, however, he pulled no punches. He believed that Williams had written “a brilliant first draft,” but he was convinced that there was more to do. “PLEASE PLEASE stop and don’t rush into production,” he said. “You’re letting yourself in for a lot of grief if you do.” In the push and pull of their collaboration, Kazan acted as a kind of clear-eyed father who had Williams’s best interests at heart. “I’m scared to death to embark with you on this play before I think the script is ready,” he insisted on October 18, in a three-page letter. “We did that on CAMINO and you had a sore blow. I don’t think you should again.” Kazan went on, “I told you way back then that I thought it was the wrong third act. About the wrong thing. You didn’t really agree with that. But I still think so. I wish I JUST WISH to Christ you’d stop and think it thru. The script is 99% of the problem in the theatre. UNITY. Clarity. What the audience follows. What they are made to be interested in and what they want to follow.” Kazan set out the problems as he saw them and challenged Williams to find solutions for himself. “I have no good suggestions,” he told Williams in his notes. “You’re out of my league. I don’t think anyone else is going to help you, however. You’re in a game where only you know the rules.” Kazan’s passion and prowess offered Williams a safety net, which emboldened the fearful playwright to write beyond himself.
The dying patriarch of Williams’s tale, Big Daddy Pollitt, had risen from Delta plantation manager to become the owner of twenty-eight-thousand acres of “the richest land this side of the valley Nile.” Into an early version of the play, Williams pasted a 1921 clipping from a local Mississippi newspaper about G. D. Perry—a friend of Reverend Dakin’s—which had planted the seed that sprouted Big Daddy and his son and daughter-in-law Gooper and Mae’s big family of “no-neck monsters”:
From Manager to Owner of 7,400 Acres in Tunica
G.D. Perry and family of Hollywood, Miss. Mr. Perry has just closed a deal for one-half interest in the Duke Plantation which consists of 14,800 acres. This gives him 7,400 acres in Tunica County, Miss. He and his wife were reared in Tennessee. He is the son of Marshall Perry, formerly of Madison County, and grandson of Col. G.W. Day of Humboldt. His wife was Miss Sallie Jett Whitley of Mason, Tenn., at which place they were married in 1897. He went to the delta in 1900 as manager for B.F. Duke, better known as Tobe Duke, on this plantation which he has just closed the deal for. He managed for Duke 12 years. After Duke’s death he leased this plantation and bought the plantation of W.M. Johnson and C.A. Barr——both of Memphis. Mr. and Mrs. Perry have nine children.
Big Daddy is a huge man, matched by a huge anger and a huge appetite for life. Williams seems to have borrowed the name and the look of the character from the father of his old Macon, Georgia, friend, Jordan Massie, a cousin of Carson McCullers, but for Big Daddy’s bombast and bawdry Williams channeled his own bull-necked father. (The title of the play also came from CC. “My father had a great gift for phrases,” Williams said. “ ‘Edwina,’ he used to say. ‘You’re making me as nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof!’ ”) Big Daddy’s voice—raffish, rough, rollicking—was mesmerizing and unique to the theater of its time, a twentieth-century manifestation of the folkloric American ring-tailed roarer. Big Daddy “strikes the keynote of the play. A terrible black anger and ferocity, a rock-bottom honesty,” said Williams, who felt he had “reached beyond” himself to find a “crude eloquence” unmatched in any of his other characters.
In the play, Big Daddy, onstage or off, is the focus of the other characters’ attention. It is his sixty-fifth birthday, and the household is celebrating his apparent clean bill of health after a struggle with cancer. He is the play’s thematic catalyst, calling out the ambition in Maggie, the greed in Gooper and his wife Mae—“a monster of fertility”—who are intent on freezing Brick out of the family inheritance, and the self-delusion in Brick:
BIG DADDY: (He snatches the glass from Brick’s hand.) What do you know about this mendacity thing? Hell! I could write a book on it! Don’t you know that? I could write a book on it and still not cover the subject? Well, I could, I could write a goddamn book
on it and still not cover the subject anywhere near enough!!—Think of all the lies I got to put up with!—Pretenses! Ain’t that mendacity! Having to pretend stuff you don’t think or feel or have any idea of? Having for instance to act like I care for Big Mama!—I haven’t been able to stand the sight, sound or smell of that woman for forty years now!—even when I laid her!—regular as a piston. . . .
Pretend to love that son of a bitch Gooper and his wife Mae and those five same screechers out there like Parrotts in a jungle? Jesus! Can’t stand to look at ’em!
Church!—it bores the Bejesus out of me but I go!—I go an’ sit there and listen to the fool preacher!
Clubs!—Elks! Masons! Rotary!—crap! . . .
I’ve lived with mendacity!—Why can’t you live with it? Hell, you got to live with it, there’s nothing else to live with except mendacity, is there?
Despite the majestic energy of Big Daddy’s personality and the brilliant extravagance of his talk, Williams, in his original conception of the play, did not bring him back in act 3. Instead, having learned from Brick that the family has kept his terminal prognosis from him, Big Daddy exits in act 2 and climbs up on the belvedere. For the rest of the play his offstage “long drawn cry of agony and rage” was the only thing that anyone in the Pollitt household heard of him. The banishment of Big Daddy from the last act was a narrative mistake. Wood remarked on it; Kazan jumped on it:
