by John Lahr
In early July, Wood informed Williams that she was about to ask for half a million dollars from MGM, which wanted the play as a vehicle for Grace Kelly. “Figures stagger imagination approve get the loot,” Williams wired back. Wood did as she was told. “You and I have come to know how difficult it is to get a hit play in New York City,” she wrote to Williams afterward. “There are not too many ‘Streetcars’ and not too many ‘Cats on Tin Roofs’ in one man’s lifetime for us to know no matter how well a man writes and how skilled he is as a playwright that it is improbable and very often impossible to continue writing good plays for any long amount of time. This is why I am more proud than usual to have been able to deliver the Metro-Goldwyn deal.”
The cash and the kudos only intensified Williams’s guilt and gripes. “I think he [Kazan] cheapened ‘Cat,’ still think so, despite the prizes,” Williams wrote Wood. “That doesn’t mean I doubt his good intentions, or don’t like him, now, it’s just that I don’t want to work with him again on a basis in which he will tell me what to do and I will be so intimidated, and so anxious to please him, that I will be gutlessly willing to go against my own taste and convictions.” Like Brick with Maggie, Williams projected onto Kazan his own moral failure and turned it into a kind of legend of betrayal. “I was terribly distressed by ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,’ although I’m living on it and it’s made me more money than anything else,” he told Edward R. Murrow in a 1960 CBS TV interview. “People tell me it came off, but for me it didn’t. It seemed almost like a prostitution or a corruption.”
The corruption, however, was Williams’s. Ten days before the New York opening, Kazan had offered to reinstate Williams’s original, preferred third act. “You never stated that in your preface,” Kazan wrote, in a letter that would end their professional relationship in 1960. “Nor did you note that I offered repeatedly to put your original third act into the road company. You made the decision not to. It’s been four years now that this horseshit has been in the press. . . . YOU NEVER ONCE SAID A WORD!! . . . You should have come to my defense long ago. Ask yourself the reason why you didn’t.”
“ONE’S ENEMY IS always part of oneself,” Williams wrote to Britneva in the slipstream of Cat’s success. Williams’s need for triumph had trumped his sense of truth. “A failure reaches fewer people, and touches fewer, than does a play that succeeds,” he wrote. Still, Williams needed to believe in the purity of his literary endeavor. A combination of vainglory and guilt compelled him to renounce the successful version. He couldn’t quite admit his bad faith, or his dependence on Kazan, whose collaboration was essential not only to his success but also to his poetic expression. Williams felt shamed both by his calculated betrayal of the play and by his pleasure at its success. That shame had enormous reverberations; it consigned him, at the peak of his acclaim and his wealth, to the psychological penance of a half-life, “a sort of a lunar personality without the shine,” as he described himself at the time. That summer he wandered aimlessly around Europe struggling to evade the truth of his artistic compromise. “I am running away from something, but don’t know what I am running away from,” he wrote to Wood from Barcelona in July 1955. “Each new place disappoints me, after a couple of days it seems like an awful mistake to have gone there. But when I return to Rome, that’s no good either.” Williams’s real disappointment was with himself.
Williams’s losses that year were not just moral or aesthetic. His grandfather, Reverend Walter Dakin, his totem of luck and love, had died, at ninety-seven, just before the rehearsals of Cat began. In the middle of the summer, another true believer—Margo Jones—died, at the age of forty-three, apparently from accidental inhalation of a toxic carpet cleaner; she was buried with the brooch that Williams had given her at the Broadway opening of Summer and Smoke. In August, the set designer Lemuel Ayers—the only member of Williams’s Iowa theater class to praise the quality of the dialogue and the atmosphere in the disastrous full-length play Spring Storm, thereby convincing Williams not to give up on theater—died at the age of forty. Each of these figures was a mainstay of Williams’s art and his integrity. In his perfervid imagination, their deaths took on symbolic weight and added to his sense of his life as sullied and unmoored. “The reaper is not only grim but active and rapid this season,” he wrote to Wood in late August.
According to the unedited manuscript of his memoirs, Williams that summer wrote only under the influence of stimulants. In his new one-act play “The Enemy: Time,” he described this condition as “the drugged state of semi-oblivion which is what an artist has left when he abandons his art.” Writing in the white heat of his internal crisis over Cat, the new play was “an examination of what is really corrupt in life,” an exploration of the vying torments of his humiliation and his ambition. In Camino Real, he had written about the difference between the will to be good and the will to be great. The ructions around Cat made him agonizingly aware of the gap between the two urges in his own character. “I believe very strongly in the existence of good,” Williams said. “I believe that honesty, understanding, sympathy, and even sexual passion are good.” His longing for goodness was broadcast in the last speech of the first draft of “The Enemy: Time,” a sort of prayer for blessing and purity: “Oh, Lady, wrap me in your starry blue robe, make my heart a perpetual novena.” Williams was aware, however, that he had traded in his big heart for a hard heart. “It is hard for me to like any playwright who is still writing plays,” he wrote to Wood at the end of his “vague summer.” “Miller, yes! Inge, sometimes . . . an ugly effect of the competitive system. They have to stun me with splendor that drives vanity out! Or I wish they’d quit writing as I have nearly this summer.”
In April 1955, just after Cat opened, Williams entertained Carson McCullers in Key West; although he had paid for his friend’s ticket, McCullers’s presence made him feel emotionally bankrupt. “It’s much easier to give money than love,” he wrote to Britneva, who had nicknamed McCullers “Choppers.” “Choppers needs love, but I am not the Baa-Baa-Black Sheep with three bags full for Choppers. I don’t even have any for the Master or the Dame or the Little Boy Down the Lane. I care only, very much, about the studio mornings at the Olivetti.” That summer, Williams was unable even to manufacture the energy to charm Anna Magnani, who had just finished filming The Rose Tattoo and whom he was now trying to corral for both a Broadway production and the film of Orpheus Descending. “Magnani is outspokenly puzzled by my behavior, and I’m afraid we may lose her simply because I act like a Zombie whenever I am with her,” he told Wood.
Williams was still adamantly hiding from himself and from others the bitter fact of his duplicity. “I am determined to express just me, not a director or actors,” he wrote later that year to Wood, refusing to beef up the role of Val in Orpheus Descending in order to lure Marlon Brando. He added, “Almost everybody of taste that I have talked to about ‘Cat’ are disturbed and thrown off somewhat by a sense of falsity, in the ending, and I don’t want this to ever happen again, even if it means giving up the top-rank names as co-workers.” But even as Williams wrote these words, he was angling for Kazan to do the literary, heavy lifting on their two-year film collaboration, Hide and Seek. “Have to finish the film-script for Gadg and really don’t know what more to do with the thing,” he wrote to Britneva in June. “Catch-as-Catch-Can [Kazan] just says re-write, re-write, re-write, and I don’t know what the hell for or about.” Over the next few months, from Williams’s various drafts and rewrites, often dispatched with the instructions “Insert Somewhere,” Kazan assembled the script for the film, which was retitled Baby Doll—a work for which, at Wood’s insistence, Williams took full screen credit and received an Academy Award nomination.
Anna Magnani as the seamstress Serafina in The Rose Tattoo
From November 1955 to January 1956, Kazan was in Benoit, Mississippi (population 341), filming Baby Doll. He took his family with him for the ten-week shoot; he had trouble, however, coaxing Williams away from Key West. “Those pe
ople chased me out of there. I left the South because of their attitude towards me. They don’t approve of homosexuals, and I don’t want to be insulted,” he told Kazan. Nonetheless, he eventually turned up, only to excuse himself after a couple of restless days with the canard that he couldn’t find a place to swim. “God damn it, I need an ending to this film,” Kazan told him. Williams was distracted from the new play he had begun by the imminent opening of a production of Streetcar, starring Tallulah Bankhead and playing at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami, that was billed as “under the supervision of Tennessee Williams,” and by the glitzy New York premiere of the movie The Rose Tattoo, featuring the legendary Magnani’s debut in American cinema. He seemed to want to be left more or less alone; so, really, did Kazan. “Now I was without an author, but I didn’t mind,” he recalled in A Life. “I was what I wanted to be, the source of everything.”
On December 18, nearly a week after The Rose Tattoo premiere, Kazan sent Williams the scenes leading up to his proposed ending for Baby Doll. “There is one small element here following that you never had in any of your bits, scraps, versions, rewrites or letters,” he told him. That “small element,” it turned out, was a big narrative deal. Archie Lee Meighan (Karl Malden) wins the hand in marriage of Baby Doll (Carroll Baker)—a nubile, manipulative nymphet of nineteen who still sleeps in her nursery crib—by promising her father that he will not attempt to consummate the union until she’s twenty. It’s a vow that drives the loutish, sex-starved Archie Lee to distraction. In the meantime, as an act of revenge, Baby Doll is pursued by Silva Vacarro (Eli Wallach, making his screen debut), a man whose cotton gin Archie Lee has burned down. Although the film leaves open the question of whether he actually seduces Baby Doll, there’s no question about the sexual heat generated between her and the Italian interloper. In Kazan’s proposed ending, Archie Lee, thinking he’s been cuckolded, shoots up Vaccaro’s place in a fit of fury, accidentally killing a black man before continuing his search for Vacarro—a finale that Kazan felt would be “both tragic and funny, El Greco and Hogarth, tiny and gigantic.”
Elia Kazan setting up a shot with Carroll Baker and Karl Malden on the Mississippi set of Baby Doll
Kazan’s idea was sensational, commercial, and bad; Williams was right back in the artistic tug of war he’d had over Cat. He showed no timidity, this time, in fighting his corner. “I simply can’t believe that you have been shooting a film that demands a finish like this outline,” Williams wrote, adding, “You say that whenever I am in trouble I go poetic. I say whenever you are in trouble, you start building up a ‘SMASH!’ finish.—As if you didn’t really trust the story that goes before. It is only this final burst of excess that mars your film-masterpieces such as ‘East of Eden,’ and it is in these final fireworks that you descend (only then) to something expected or banal which all the preceding artistry and sense of measure and poetry—yes, you are a poet, too! no matter how much you hate it!—leads one not to expect.” Kazan’s attention-grabbing finale was a piece of cinematic showboating, violent hokum that introduced a discordant note into Williams’s comédie humaine. “Not false to the country. The hell with the Delta!” Williams said. “But false to the key and mood of the story.” He went on, “Killing a negro is not a part of universal human behavior, witness all the universal Archie Lees in this world who never killed a negro and never quite would! They would commit arson, yes, they would lie and cheat and jerk off back of a peep-hole, but they wouldn’t be likely to kill a negro and slam the car door on his dying body and go on shooting and shouting, now, would they?! . . . A killing is not so much a moral discrepancy as it is an artistic outrage of the film-play’s natural limits.” Williams suggested something more in keeping with the story’s comic tone and scale—like Archie Lee blasting his shotgun at a car, then opening the car door to discover a black man inside, and saying, “Oh, it’s you! Excuse me.” Williams’s version appears in the film; Kazan’s does not.
When it came to promoting the movie, however, Kazan the showman—Baby Doll was the first picture produced by his newly formed Newtown Productions—won out. He had a billboard about the size of the Statue of Liberty (15,600 square feet, a third of an acre) built above the Victoria Theatre on Broadway, where the movie debuted. It was the biggest painted sign in the world. “No one showboats anymore,” he swaggered to Warner Brothers. “Trust my instinct.”
Kazan thought he had made “a very cute movie.” The Catholic Church, however, thought he’d made a very evil one. The Legion of Decency rated it C for “Condemned.” Without ever having seen the film, Cardinal Spellman took to the pulpit of St. Patrick’s Cathedral to denounce it. “I exhort Catholic people to refrain from patronizing this film under pain of sin,” the Cardinal said. “The revolting theme of this picture, ‘Baby Doll,’ and the brazen advertising promoting it, constitute a contemptuous defiance of the natural law, the observance of which has been the source of strength in our national life.” (Williams’s brother, Dakin, then an officer in the Air Force and a recent Catholic convert, had to pay the church twenty-five dollars for a dispensation to see the film.) The tabloids spewed boldface headlines. “ ‘BABY DOLL’ IN NEW ROW,” the New York Post shouted from its front page. En route to the premiere on December 18—“a harrowing experience”—Williams weighed in. “I cannot believe that an ancient and august branch of the Christian faith is not larger in heart and mind than those who set themselves up as censors of a medium of expression that reaches all sections and parts of our country and extends the world over.” Kazan declared, “I am outraged by the charge that it is unpatriotic. In the court of public opinion, I’ll take my chance.”
What remained in public memory, over time, was not the film itself but the billboard. The behemoth image of Carroll Baker, sprawled the length of a city block in her short nightie, sucking her thumb, and reclining in a crib, became as iconic an erotic emblem of the era as Marilyn Monroe holding down her billowing white skirt in The Seven Year Itch. “This is the greatest idea since the days of Barnum,” Kazan told Warner Brothers when he pitched the billboard; the sign, he assured the studio, would make Baby Doll “the talk not only of Broadway, but of the show world, of café society, of the literati, of the lowbrows, and of everybody else. I really don’t see how anyone could avoid going to the picture if we put that sign up there.” Kazan was right about the sign, wrong about the film. Generally speaking, the critical response to Baby Doll was muted. (Nowadays, Williams’s half-heartedness is all too apparent in the strained, lackluster dark comedy.) Controversy, however, never hurt the box office. Baby Doll made news and money; it also made Williams a subject of scandal. The New Republic christened the film “The Crass Menagerie.” “Just possibly the dirtiest American-made motion picture that has ever been legally exhibited,” Time said. Baby Doll had no nudity, no simulated sex, no foul language, and little violence; by contemporary standards, it was Simon Pure. Nonetheless, in the popular mind, thanks as much to the sensational sign as to the story, the film became synonymous with louche sex. In the New Republic, Williams found himself dubbed “the high priest of merde.” The attention only drove up his literary stock. MGM offered him another half-million dollars for his new play, still in its unfinished first draft. Every ignominy, Williams was learning, fueled his fame; likewise, fame fueled his ignominy.
The Baby Doll billboard in Times Square
THE YEAR THAT ended in a public fracas over Baby Doll had begun, in January, with another one involving the fifty-four-year-old Tallulah Bankhead, who was playing Blanche in Streetcar at the Coconut Grove Playhouse. “She is the bitch of all time, but what a worker!” Williams wrote to Wood, after he was banned from rehearsals. From the outset, Williams had muddied the water between Bankhead and himself by bringing Britneva to Florida for the opening of a production for which she had unsuccessfully auditioned as Stella. “From the moment Miss Bankhead saw Maria, she would have none of her,” Sandy Campbell wrote in B, a privately printed epistolary account to his partner Donald
Windham about the production in which he had a small part. “Tenn is licking his lips with the prospect of an encounter.”
On opening night—a performance that was overrun by Bankhead’s rowdy camp followers—Williams came into her dressing room, got down on his knees, put his head in her lap, and said, “Tallulah this is the way I imagined the part when I wrote the play.” At a party in honor of the cast that evening, however, according to Campbell, a juiced-up Williams, “in a voice all nearby (about a hundred or so people) could hear,” told Jean Dalrymple that if B[ankhead] continued to give such an appalling performance he would not allow the play to open in New York. She was “playing it for vaudeville and ruining my play.” Campbell added, “Maria, naturally . . . talking violently against B’s performance.” Inevitably, there was a showdown: Williams, who had hypocritically praised her, now told Bankhead she’d given a bad first-night performance. Campbell, who was present, recounted the scene:
“And you had the nerve to say that after getting down on your knees to me in the dressing room,” B said.
“Are you calling me a hypocrite? . . .”
“And bringing that bitch, Maria, to the party is shocking,” B said.
Tenn, standing up: “My dear, I do not have to stand for this anymore. Calling . . . my best friend a black bitch is more than I will take!” And he marched out.
Tallulah Bankhead as Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire
When the show transferred to New York—“Batten the hatches! Hurricane Tallulah headed for Manhattan. Refugees pouring into Havana from Coconut Grove and Palm Beach!” Williams joked in a postcard to Paul Bigelow—he was forced to eat his words, backpedalling beyond hype into craven falsehood. In a New York Times tribute, Williams called Bankhead’s performance “probably the most heroic accomplishment since Laurette Taylor returned in the Chicago winter of 1944–45 to stand all her doubters on their ears in ‘The Glass Menagerie.’ ” Williams went on, “When the play opened at the City Center, this small, mighty woman had met and conquered the challenge.” In her public reply to Williams’s courtly Times flim-flam, Bankhead quipped, “Mr. Williams’ talents as a playwright are considerable, but in his recent tribute he forever scuttled the ancient legend, in vino veritas.” Privately she fumed, “If I am a small, mighty woman, he is a mighty small man.”
