Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

by John Lahr

  This play is about what the second act is about.

  The first act needs work, yes. But it’s not the crucial problem.

  I think the central problem is to find out what the second act is about and to resolve that in Act 3.

  The third act just plain loses me.

  I want to know what Big Daddy does, after he’s been told. That isn’t there. Simply and plainly, whom does he affirm? All right, I know you detest the word affirm. What does he do when he climbs up there?

  I don’t give a shit in hell how Big Mama takes the fucking news. We know.

  It bores me to see Margaret and Mae squabble and bitch. It’s beneath your play and we’ve had it. It’s worth about a minute of action and not a second of act three. . . .

  What is the hurry? A guy with talent the size of yours shouldn’t put out something half-baked. You have a super superb second act. I know, I just know the third act is not right. I don’t know what it should be. I think keeping the old man “alive” on the Belvedere is just a substitute.

  Please don’t satisfy me. Take time to satisfy yourself. Are YOU really satisfied with this play? You weren’t at all when you gave it to me. . . . Tenn, this play is just not ready to have conferences about yet. That’s the plain plain plain truth.

  In another note, on October 20, Kazan added more fuel to the fire: “I am left at the end of Act II with an intense concern with Big Daddy’s fate—and I want to see how he comes out, so to speak. I wouldn’t even mind him just sitting on stage for a moment or two at the beginning of Act III. It would interest me more than what you have there now. . . . You can’t get me all hot and bothered and then walk away and say let’s look at the view.” To the vinegar of his unfettered opinions—he delivered them in a back-to-back flurry of hastily typed notes over two days—Kazan added the honey of praise. “I think you’ve got the best play here potentially in years and years,” he wrote. “Why throw that away because this wind of let’s get going is pushing you? I’m not going anywhere. I want to do the play badly. I don’t get but one play I really want to do every three years or so. I sure want to do this one.”

  On receiving Kazan’s first set of notes, Williams couldn’t sleep; nonetheless, at eight the next morning he was at the typewriter, determined, he told Kazan, “to get what you want without losing what I want.” Williams added, “I dare to believe that I can work this out, but it would help me immeasurably if you and some producer would give me a vote of confidence by committing yourself to a date of production with the work still on the bench.”

  By October 29, as Williams reported to Britneva, Kazan “had committed himself (verbally) to do ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.’ ” The parenthetic word in Williams’s sentence spoke volumes. Kazan was slippery. His power over a script’s final shape was in direct proportion to the withholding of his complete commitment. Kazan knew his measure; even in production he was not above using his prestige as leverage to control Williams. At one rehearsal, Williams called up from the orchestra to Barbara Bel Geddes, who was the original Maggie: “More melody in your voice, Barbara. Southern girls have melody in their—” Kazan cut him off, then came up the aisle to sit beside Williams. “I whispered to him that if he did that again, I’d quit,” Kazan recalled. Despite their loyalty, for both men, working together was a delicate dance.

  In order not to lose Kazan, Williams had to find ways to answer his narrative demands, while keeping “the core of the play very hard, because I detest plays that are built around something mushy such as I feel under the surface of many sentimental successes in the theatre.” Nobody has ever gone broke on Broadway purveying absolutes; as Williams saw it, however, he was dramatizing ambivalence. “This is a play about good bastards and good bitches,” he told Kazan. “I mean it exposes the startling co-existence of good and evil, the shocking duality of the single heart.” He went on, “I am as happy as you are that our discussions have led to a way of highlighting the good in Maggie, the indestructible spirit of Big Daddy, so that the final effect of the play is not negative, this is a forward step, a step toward a larger truth which will add immeasurably to the play’s power of communication or scope of communication.”

  “Characters you can root for” was the mantra of Broadway’s commercial swamis. In the case of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Williams heard the phrase from Wood, from Crawford, and from Kazan. “Vitality is the hero of the play!” Williams insisted. “The character you can ‘root for’ . . . is not a person but a quality in people that makes them survive.” Nonetheless, as he told Kazan, he was rewriting act 1 in a tighter, straighter line, “and concentrating on the character of Margaret with emphasis on those things about her which make her human, understandable, and likeable. Someone who’s always crouched at the feet of the rich and lucky with the smile of a beggar, and the claws of a cat. Expecting a kick, but begging for something better and willing to give for it plenty!—a normal, though desperate, person. A fighter.”

  Williams appropriated the nickname “Maggie the Cat” from Margaret Lewis Powell, a friend of Williams’s friend Jordan Massie. But the prototype for Maggie’s desperation, ruthlessness, outspokenness, and hyperbolic flair was someone who was closer to hand for the best part of the summer of 1954: Maria Britneva, to whom the play is dedicated. (An early version was dedicated to Wood.) “I think a lot of you has gone into the writing of it. Wit and gallantry etc.,” Williams wrote to Britneva, while demurring on her characteristically brazen request to be elevated from bit player to star of Cat for its Broadway debut. The drawled iconic epithet in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’s first line—“no-neck monsters”—was a piece of Britneva’s comic vitriol: one of the many caustic mots that Williams enjoyed collecting and repeating. When Britneva read the final version of the script, she protested that she wouldn’t talk like Maggie. “Honey! I’m writing about your spirit—your tenacity,” Williams said. But he captured more than her tenacity; Britneva’s flirtatiousness and her rapacity, her humiliated heart and her grandiose sense of entitlement were the elements from which Williams distilled much of Maggie’s manic vitality. “You can be young without money but you can’t be old without it,” Maggie famously tells Brick. “You’ve got to be old with money because to be old without it is just too awful.” Like Britneva, Maggie “always had to suck up to people I couldn’t stand because they had money and I was poor as Job’s turkey.” She is a picturesque combination of sycophancy and ferocity—especially in the early versions of Cat where Maggie is even more extreme:

  The dress I married you in was my grandmother’s wedding-gown and I had to pretend I wore it for sentimental reasons! Hell, I liked the moths better that ate it than that mean old witch that’d—bequeathed it to me, just about all that—

  (Jerks a drawer open)

  —anyone ever—

  (Slams drawer shut)

  —left me, in spite of all my—

  (Dabs forehead)

  —bowing and scraping to them. . . .

  (Rises before the full-length mirror)

  So that’s why I’m like a cat on a hot tin roof! . . . But I don’t look like one, do I? Now? Or do I? Even now?

  You’re right. I must break myself of this habit of straining my throat muscles so they stick out!—like the neck of somebody rowning!—as if I was trying to keep my head above water. . . .

  Well, I am!

  In 1952, Britneva, “the furious Tartar,” as Williams dubbed her, began a relationship with the talented, square-jawed James Laughlin, Williams’s millionaire publisher. When Laughlin resumed an affair with an American cohort at his publishing company, New Directions, Britneva immediately glommed onto John Huston. “I introduced them on the set of ‘Moulin Rouge,’ ” Williams wrote to Wood. “I had not been here a day when I received a wire from Maria. ‘AT IT LIKE KNIVES. HUSTON A STEAMING HOT CUP OF TEA. WANT TO STAY IN PARIS CALL ME.’ ” Williams added, “I do hope she gets a job out of this, which was the original purpose of the meeting, and not just another one of her peculiar misadventures.”r />
  By the spring of 1954, however, Britneva was back together with Laughlin, and their engagement was precipitously announced in the London Times. The news, Williams wired them, “made me cry with happiness.” Laughlin’s patrician American mother, however, was not so happy. “Jamesie! A RUSSIAN! Can’t you find a nice American girl who knows our ways,” Laughlin recalled her saying. His mother’s disapproval put Britneva immediately on her high horse. “Darling!” Williams counseled her, “Nobody loves honesty more than I, but honey! There are times, there are situations, there are circumstances in which the head must not rule the heart but at least act in collaboration with it. You seem to be doing and saying or thinking all the wrong things.”

  When Laughlin got cold feet and broke off the engagement several months later, it was ostensibly due to Britneva’s avidity—she had gone out shopping in Florence to buy Laughlin a silk tie and returned with eight. “My God! What are you going to do with all my money?” Laughlin asked her. “I was genuinely surprised,” Britneva recalled. “ ‘Why, have you got any?—I’ll spend it, of course!’ ” (Britneva knew perfectly well that Laughlin was wealthy. A press release she later composed, with the help of a New York PR man, refers to her having “broken her engagement to a multimillionaire steel heir.”) It was Britneva’s castrating willfulness that really terrified Laughlin. “I think you are one of the world’s more attractive girls,” he admitted to her in his Dear Maria letter. “But I’m also afraid of you—afraid of how you might wreck my life with all that mis-directed energy pouring out of you like a giant Russian dynamo.” In a five-page handwritten letter to Williams, he spelled out his fears more directly: “She is so strong-willed and dominating and, to use her phrase, ‘makes such rows’ when I assert myself against her wishes. If anything, in the years I have known her, she has become more vital and active, more ready to get caught up in the interests and doings of people who do not really fit into the center of her picture.” He added, “I doubt if she is really ‘crushed,’ as you say. I don’t think you really understand what a vitality she has. Nothing could or would crush her.”

  For most of the summer of 1954, Britneva and Williams wandered around Europe. By September, she was still on Williams’s meal ticket and “suggesting more trips,” as he sourly admitted to Wood. “Poor little Maria!” he told Wood. “I said she must forget Jay and go back to her old life. She said, What life? I have none. I said, Well, you’ve got to make one. Nobody can be that Russian this long!”

  By the end of the summer, Maria’s freeloading, compounded with her high-handedness, had become a fractious issue in Williams’s ménage. “All hell has broke loose here,” Williams wrote to Wood. “Maria has denounced Frank as ‘common, ill-bred, Etc.’ and, at least for the past night, has removed herself from the premises.” Williams went on, “The trouble is that she wants to be treated constantly as a guest although, since she has been with us all summer, we can only treat her as a member of the family without giving up our agreeable pattern of life. Another trouble is that she is without any personal funds to speak of, and is embarrassingly dependent on us. She will not be realistic about this but wants us to entertain her titled friends at expensive restaurants, Etc., and when she leaves in the mornings, there is usually a message on the table giving us instructions of what to do. I tolerate this because I am very fond of her and am keenly aware of her emotional upset over being jilted by Jay.”

  Throughout the summer of 1954, as he was finishing Cat and working on the revisions, Williams was enlisted in Britneva’s real-life never-say-die battle to claim what she felt was her emotional and creative due. “Maria and I are writing letters beside the country club pool, she to Jay, I to you,” Williams wrote to Wood. “I think I should let you know that M is probably flying to America this summer to have a showdown with Jay. She feels that it would strengthen, or dignify, her position if she had a job in the States and were not just pursuing him there. Can you think of anything for her? I have offered to pay her fare and allow her to occupy our NY apartment.” Through the intercession of Williams, Kazan, and other theatrical grandees of her acquaintance, Britneva got a work permit, which allowed her, as “an artist of outstanding merit and ability,” to perform in America. Her goal, however, was not to get work but to get Laughlin—and she was driving him half-crazy. “The help she needs is artistic and emotional, not material,” Williams wrote Laughlin. “I am sorry if her presence in America complicated things for you or makes you uncomfortable.”

  “I don’t think anyone has ever upset me so much,” Laughlin told Williams. “She has wonderful qualities and if she would just get over her illusions—me, for one, and the idea that she has to be an actress for another—I think she would have a happy and useful life.” Laughlin wanted to help Britneva financially, but his counselors argued for a clean break, because “as long as she thinks I am helping her she thinks that means in the end I will accept her and it just prolongs the illusion and her misery.” Like Maggie, who refuses to lose, Britneva would not be denied. Once in America, she sought any means to inveigle her way back into Laughlin’s life, including becoming a patient of the same psychotherapist. “The very fact that she went to such lengths to worm it out of the doctor where the help was coming from just proves that point,” Laughlin wrote. “And her whole thought in going to him—as far as I can gather from talking to him—has been that by doing so she would alter her personality so that I would like her. In other words, she went to him not really to help herself, but just as a further means of getting at me.”

  If Britneva eventually had to relinquish her romantic dream, she clung staunchly to her artistic one. On March 3, 1955, three weeks before the Broadway debut of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, she debuted as Blanche in a revival of Streetcar at the Originals Only Playhouse in Sheridan Square. In Five O’Clock Angel, Britneva refers to Brooks Atkinson’s praise, in the New York Times, of her performance and her “exciting ideas about the doomed heroine.” “She uses unexpected humor to reveal the gallant soul beneath the cracking veneer,” Britneva quotes Atkinson. “The serenity of the final and complete escape from sanity, hitherto the weakest scene in the play, now comes as close to tragedy as anything by an American playwright since O’Neill.” The review is more important for its retrospective revelations about Britneva than it is for her glory as an actress. Maggie, in her desperation, will do anything—even lie—to win the day; so would Britneva. Atkinson’s favorable review, it turns out, was her own invention. In reality, what he wrote was, “There is no point in pretending that the acting conveys the intricate mysteries of the script. . . . Maria Brit-Neva, an English actress, is not able to express the inner tensions of that haunted gentlewoman.”

  Williams’s compassionate interpolation of Britneva’s character into Cat on a Hot Tin Roof actually prefigured her real-life marriage of inconvenience. On July 25, 1956, she married Peter Grenfell, Lord St. Just, the son of Edward Grenfell, the English banking partner of J. P. Morgan who had been made a baron in 1935. Peter, who had a love of country pursuits and ballet and opera, suffered from a manic depression that led to frequent bouts of uncontrollable shaking and crying. Britneva took him out of a sanatorium to marry him. While she was at Harvey Nichols buying gloves for the wedding, he bolted. They spent their wedding night at Claridge’s, but after a furious row the next day, Lord Peter again ran off for a fortnight. “He was in kind of strange shape,” Jean Stein, a friend of Britneva’s whose father was the head of the media conglomerate MCA, recalled, adding, of Britneva’s behavior, which was an eerie simulacrum of Maggie’s scheming, “To be Lady St. Just and to have some money. Are you kidding? She had nothing. Desperate. And to have that beautiful home in the country and to be legitimate!” “He thought she could help him,” Bobby Henderson, a trustee of Peter St. Just’s estate said. “She had an effect on him. She bemused him. Her amusingness distracted him. It was an escape. He certainly had strong feelings to be near her; and then he didn’t.”

  Though the marriage produced two ch
ildren, St. Just also fathered at least one and possibly two illegitimate children. And his mother treated Maria badly. Lord Peter and Lady Maria were put on a minimal allowance by his trustees. “Maria was living in a tiny, tiny flat with her two babies in London,” Harriet Van Horne, an American newspaper columnist and friend who visited her there in the late 1950s, said. A house was eventually purchased for the couple but was put in the names of their children. “She lived there by grace and favor,” Van Horne said.

  By November 1954, Williams had turned in his revisions to Kazan. As part of his humanizing enterprise, he had given Maggie a different ending. “I am not at all sure that this new ending is what I want,” he wrote to Wood. “Do you think it contains an echo of ‘Tea and Sympathy’?” He went on, “Here is another case of a woman giving a man back his manhood, while in the original conception it was about a vital, strong woman dominating a weak man and achieving her will. Also: does Big Daddy’s reappearance really and truly add anything that’s important to the story besides making it softer or sweeter or easier to take?”

  Williams’s faith in his original play had recently been strengthened by Christopher Isherwood, to whom he had read his first typed draft. “He loved it, said he thought it in many ways my best play,” Williams told Wood. He decided to fly to Los Angeles, where The Rose Tattoo was filming, to talk to Kazan. “Isherwood will be there and possibly the three of us could arrive at an agreement about the ‘Cat’ script that would satisfy both Gadg and me,” he said. As late as November 23, Kazan had still not committed to direct the play. “I think Gadg must let us know right away if he is or isn’t willing to make a definite commitment at a specific time.”