Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

by John Lahr

  Williams’s spiritual problem was the same as Val’s and Lady’s: how to negotiate a path from corruption back to purity. While writing was his imagined redemption, guitar-playing was Val’s. “I’m through with the life I’ve been leading,” Val tells Lady. “I lived in corruption but I’m not corrupted. Here is why. (Picks up his guitar.) My life’s companion! It washes me clean like water when anything unclean has touched me.” When Val finally plays the guitar—which is autographed with the names of Lead Belly, Bessie Smith, and Blind Lemon Jefferson—he sings about a “heavenly itch,” a will to believe in transcendence, which Williams, too, even in his darkest times, never surrendered:

  My feet took a walk in heavenly grass.

  All day while the sky shone clear as glass

  My feet took a walk in heavenly grass,

  All night while the lonesome stars rolled past.

  Then my feet come down to walk on earth,

  And my mother cried when she give me birth.

  Now my feet walk far and my feet walk fast,

  But they still got an itch for heavenly grass.

  A self-proclaimed outsider, Val confesses to Lady that he’s “disgusted” with the world he’s known, a world composed, he says, of just two kinds of people: “the ones that are bought and the buyers.” Val classifies himself in a third category—“bum”—a dreamer who tries not to be touched by life’s craven hurly-burly. “You rise above it?” Lady asks. “I try to,” Val says, at which point “off-stage guitar music fades in.” Music—specifically the joyous and defiant music of the blues messengers who have signed his guitar—is the agent of Val’s transcendence. The magic of creative freedom is the essence of the story that Val spins for Lady—in the play’s most famous passage—about a bird that sleeps on the wind, never touching earth, except to die:

  VAL: You know they’s a kind of bird that don’t have legs so it can’t light on nothing but has to stay all its life on its wings in the sky? That’s true. I seen one once, it had died and fallen to earth and it was light-blue colored and its body was tiny as your little finger, that’s the truth, it had a body as tiny as your little finger and so light on the palm of your hand it didn’t weigh more than a feather, but its wings spread out this wide but they was transparent, the color of the sky, and you could see through them. That’s what they call protection coloring. Camouflage, they call it. You can’t tell those birds from the sky and that’s why the hawks don’t catch them, don’t see them up there in the high blue sky near the sun! . . . So’d I like to be one of those birds; they’s lots of people would like to be one of those birds and never be—corrupted!

  LADY: . . . I don’t think nothing living has ever been that free, not even nearly. . . . I sure would give this mercantile store and every bit of stock in it to be that tiny bird the color of the sky . . . for one night to sleep on the wind and—float!—around under th’—stars. . . . (Jabe knocks on floor. Lady’s eyes return to Val.) Because I live with a son of a bitch who bought me at a fire sale, and not in fifteen years have I had a single good dream.

  Val, of course, becomes Lady’s good dream; desire is her escape route from corruption. “Ask me how it felt to be coupled with death up there, and I can tell you,” Lady says, adding, “I endured it. I guess my heart knew that somebody must be coming to take me out of this hell. You did. You came. Now look at me! I’m alive, once more!” Having found him, Lady is desperate to keep him. She latches onto Val like Ishmael to his coffin. In her frenzy, she is ruthless. She threatens to frame Val; she holds his guitar as ransom; she tries to bribe him by offering him the store (“Everything Death’s scraped together down here!—but Death has got to die before we can go”).

  This paradoxical spectacle of passion is played out around the opening of a confectionery, which Lady is determined to reconstruct as a wine garden and late-night club. The wine garden is a memorial to Lady’s father, a way of avenging his death that is a central part of Lady’s story and her psychology. “Electric moon, cut-out silver-paper stars and artificial vines? Why, it’s her father’s wine garden on Moon Lake she’s turned this room into,” a character explains, just in case the audience missed the visual clues. Lady’s wine garden is a piece of theater, a production in every sense of the word. Her strategy, like Williams’s, is to restage her oppressive history in order to defiantly triumph over it. “To—be not defeated!” she swaggers, adding, “You get me? Just to be not defeated. Ah, oh, I won’t be defeated, not again, in my life!”

  On the day of the confectionery’s gala opening, in act 3, Jabe shuffles downstairs to inspect the room; he immediately understands what’s going on, and he matches Lady’s aggression with his own. “Didn’t I marry a live one,” he says, “with a muted ferocity” to his nurse. “Her daddy ‘The Wop’ was just as much of a live one till he burned up. He had a wine garden on the north shore of Moon Lake. The new confectionery sort of reminds me of it.” Jabe adds, “But he made a mistake, he made a bad mistake, one time, selling liquor to niggers. We burned him out.”

  In Battle of Angels, Myra expresses her murderous feelings toward Jabe from the outset. Lady, however, doesn’t see her own rage until the news of Jabe’s complicity in her grievous loss calls it out into the open. In act 3, pregnant with Val’s baby and filled with triumphalist hysteria—“Lady, you been a lunatic since this morning!” Val says—she feels absolved of responsibility for anything that happens. “I was made to commit a murder by him up there!—I want that man to see the wine garden come open again when he’s dying!” Lady says. She continues, “It’s necessary, no power on earth can stop it. Hell, I don’t even want it, it’s just necessary, it’s just something’s got to be done to square things away.”

  Val knows that Jabe is dying upstairs; he also knows that Jabe sleeps with a gun under his pillow. The event is too provocative. “You can’t open a night-place here this night,” Val tells her, balking at changing into his white waiter’s jacket.

  LADY: You bet your sweet life I’m going to!

  VAL: Not me, not my sweet life!

  LADY: I’m betting my life on it! Sweet or not sweet, I’m—

  VAL: Yours is yours, mine is mine . . .

  Although Val confesses in one breath that he feels “a true love” for Lady, in the next breath he’s telling her he’ll wait for her somewhere out of the county. Lady cuts him off. “Oh, don’t talk about love, not to me. Because I know what you are,” she says. When Val learns, in the play’s penultimate beat, that she is pregnant, Lady finally releases him: “You’ve given me life, you can go!” These are selfish, not star-crossed, lovers; Val is caught in the slipstream of Lady’s euphoric sense of liberation, which ends with her “in a sort of delirium” running to the upstairs landing, and “crying out,” “I’ve won, Mr. Death, I’m going to bear!”

  Lady’s reckless words betray not only herself but also Val. She literally calls destruction down on both of them. “Oh, God, what did I do?” she says, almost instantly registering her mistake and retreating down the stairs as Jabe’s clumping footsteps are heard. Jabe appears at the landing and fires all the bullets of his revolver into Lady, then tells the gathering crowd that Val has done it. Val bolts for the door only to be intercepted by locals, who pull him outside.

  In the offstage commotion—the sound of voices, racing motors, baying chain-gang dogs—Val appears to break away from his captors, only to be cornered and torn apart. The revenge is not Lady’s but Jabe’s. In the end, Lady and Val don’t evade their own corruption; they are claimed by it. Their new lives are defeated by the lethal forces of their old ones. With her dying breath, Lady repeats a line her father used to say: “The show is over. The Monkey is dead.” It’s a reference to a tale she has told Val about her father buying an organ grinder’s monkey, who died in the middle of their busking act. But the strained, strange image resonates with other meanings. Williams himself was the performing monkey whose act was killing him. The garden of his own imagination was in danger of being overrun by destr
uctive forces that he could name but not control.

  ORPHEUS DESCENDING CIRCLED Broadway for two years before finally opening at the Martin Beck Theatre on March 21, 1957. Of the many impediments along the way—Williams’s rewrites, settling on producing arrangements, the success of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof—the main one was wrangling Magnani, whom Williams dubbed “the Tigress of the Tiber.” Although Lady’s interior life, like Myra’s in Battle of Angels, is modeled on Edwina Williams—“a woman who met with emotional disaster in her girlhood; verges on hysteria under strain”—her exterior displays Magnani’s forthright toughness and sexual ripeness. “The only important thing in life is to be authentic,” Magnani said. To Williams, she lived up to her credo. “She was beyond convention as no one I’ve ever known,” he said. Although Williams was shy with Magnani at first—Merlo was “the intermediary between my reserve and her beautifully natural lack of it,” he said—he soon fell under her darkly shimmering spell.

  “Forget that bit about her being nervous,” Williams wrote to Kazan in 1955, after Williams watched Magnani perform for her American film debut on The Rose Tattoo location next to his Key West house. “That dame is nervous in a way that’s terrific! She takes over like Grant did at Richmond!” Even more admirable to Williams than Magnani’s passion was her “incomparable sense of truth.” To Williams, her face was “like a mackerel sky, altering from moment to moment and always the most precise gauge, accurate as a seismograph, of the varying quality of what she was listening to.” He added, “She is almost a lie detector.”

  The size of Magnani’s talent was matched by the size of her ego, which “surpasses mine but is more excusable,” Williams wrote to Wood. Magnani was in the habit of rising at about three each afternoon. “Ciao, Tenn. What is the program,” she’d say over the phone. Williams endured her habit of dining at eleven (“greater love (or is it endurance) hath no man”); the production she made of eating (“restaurateurs and waiters received her like a queen . . . she ordered wines, pastas, salads, entrees without consulting the menu”); and her midnight rambles, with the sack of restaurant leftovers she demanded, to feed the stray cats of Rome.

  At the same time, there was continuing worry about her English, her schedule, her money, her weight, and her co-star. The news, in 1955, of Marlon Brando’s interest in playing Val—“I know how to write for that boy,” Williams said—got Williams back not only to rewriting the play but eventually to ghostwriting mash notes for Magnani to send to Brando. (“She has a genius for the wrong attachments,” Williams wrote to Britneva, about Magnani’s appetite for younger men. Sixteen years her junior, Brando fit her particular sexual sweet tooth.) The prospect of Brando was a spur to both Williams and Magnani. “This news gave me a great joy,” she wrote to Wood. “Such a news gave me a courage of a lion and I’m ready to face this big struggle.” But Brando, who thought Val’s part was weaker than Lady’s and demanded rewrites, wouldn’t answer calls, not even from Williams.

  By November 1955, exasperated by the silence, Magnani tried to get involved in the negotiation. “I know that Brando is very much interested in this play, and I also know that he asked Tennessee to alter the final part of his character, and frankly for an actor of his calibre, it should be granted,” she wrote to Wood. “Keeping in mind that with his talent and sensibility HE WILL NEVER ASK FOR SOMETHING THAT WOULD ALTER THE SPIRIT OF THE PLAY. Why not agree to that?” Magnani continued, “Do you realize the importance of giving to Broadway an important, if not the most important artistic event of the century by re-uniting the names of Tennessee Williams, Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani. . . . You must get Brando.”

  Anna Magnani and Marlon Brando in The Fugitive Kind

  By September 1956, however, both Magnani and Brando had withdrawn from the Broadway production. Brando admired the play—“You wrote your funky ass off,” he told Williams. Brando’s problem was with Magnani. “When you play with her you either make sure that the parts are equally volatile or plan to carry a fair sized rock in your hand when you go on stage,” he wrote.

  Magnani doesn’t frighten me, how can any one so lonely and so choked with longing frighten anybody? I think that she is a woman of unusual force who has a very hard time because she can’t find any one that would be willing to defeat her if they could. She yearns to be subjugated in a way that is natural to all women but she can’t find anybody with enough fire to “burn her down.” As well as strength she has aggression, and that makes her pitifully incongruous because it makes her domineering in her search to being dominated. The total effect of her force doesn’t make her frightening it just makes her unattractive. When I refer to her wanting to be burned down, I don’t mean just sexually, I mean she must find someone that will utilize her completely as a woman and love her too. As an actress she is a different rag on a different bush. I can’t think of an actress I would rather play with providing the potential dynamics of the parts are equal.

  It took three years and the first million-dollar contract in movie history to get Brando to play Val opposite Magnani in the film version, The Fugitive Kind. “The money wasn’t nearly as much a problem as the fact he wouldn’t sleep with her,” the director Sidney Lumet said. Brando and Magnani never shared off-camera the sweet sensuality of the romantic attachment between Val and Lady. “After we had some meetings in California, she tried several times to see me alone, and finally succeeded one afternoon at the Beverly Hills Hotel,” Brando explained in his autobiography. “Without any encouragement from me, she started kissing me with great passion.” He went on, “To refuse her would have been a terrible insult. But once she got her arms around me, she wouldn’t let go. If I started to pull away, she held on tight and bit my lip, which really hurt. With her teeth gnawing at my lower lip, the two of us locked in an embrace . . . we rocked back and forth as she tried to lead me to the bed. My eyes were wide open, and as I looked at her eyeball-to-eyeball I saw that she was in a frenzy, Attila the Hun in full attack. Finally the pain got so intense that I grabbed her nose and squeezed it as hard as I could, as if I were squeezing a lemon, to push her away. It startled her, and I made my escape.”

  Sidney Lumet directs Marlon Brando in The Fugitive Kind

  Magnani posed problems for her director as well. “The essence of Anna?” Lumet said. “One day our call on set was 9:10, no Anna. 9:30, no Anna. 10:00, no Anna. I go, ‘Fuck.’ I went up to her dressing room. I come in. Marlon is there by the door, against the wall, shaking his head. She’s seriously stain-faced, mascara running, the works. I said, ‘Jesus, Anna, what’s happened!’ So help me God, she says, ‘Even in Italy, even in Italy, he won’t give me first billing!’ ”

  Magnani commanded Lumet to shoot her only from the right side. “It completely ruined my staging,” Lumet said. “It meant that everyone had to be in a certain position in relation to her. You never saw Marlon’s right side, because he was always opposite her. I cannot tell you how destructive this kind of thing is to a movie.” Lumet went on, “A very gentle cameraman will sometimes imply a tenderness to a scene. I used it on Marlon’s big speech about the bird sleeping on the wind. I couldn’t do those gentle movements right to left with her. I generally stayed above the eye level. It was fatal because of the lack of tenderness, the lack of knowledge.” Despite Brando’s opening five-minute monologue to the camera, which was done in one take and is among the finest, and least known, of his great film performances, and Magnani’s magnificent fury, their chemistry never lived up to the shout line of the ads—“Their fire! Their fever! Their desire!” The Fugitive Kind “sputters more often than it sizzles,” Variety said. The fact that the New York Times’s Bosley Crowther found his senses “throbbing and feeling staggered and spent at the end” hardly mattered. The Fugitive Kind, which Lumet knew was botched from “the first time I saw the rushes” because of Magnani’s caveats, was a box-office disaster.

  Williams had counted on Magnani to be a creative influence on Harold Clurman, the director of the Broadway production. As a co-foun
der of the Group Theatre in the thirties, Clurman had made his name directing the naturalistic work of Clifford Odets; by the late fifties, he had achieved a string of impressive Broadway hits, including The Member of the Wedding, Bus Stop, and The Waltz of the Toreadors. An early admirer of Williams, he had been a signatory of the “Special Award” from the Group Theatre that launched Williams’s playwriting career in 1939. In 1940, he had offered to mount one of Williams’s one-act plays at the Group just before it collapsed. Clurman had Williams’s measure, if not his metabolism. “It is the ‘peculiar people,’ the unprotected, the innocently sincere, the injured, the estranged, the queer, the defenseless, the abandoned and the maimed whom Williams redeems with his compassion,” he wrote.

  Although Williams considered Clurman a “dear man and fine critic,” as an artistic team the two were a forced fit. Clurman was a man of reason, not intuition; he had energy but not poetry. He was an explainer, an arguer, an inspirer, a man of vivacious intellect, but more boulevardier than bohemian. Penetrating in his analysis of plays and buoyant in his personality, he was romantic in his devotion to art but not in his relation to life. His mind was seductive, but his physical presence was not. Talk, for him, was the source of erotic connection. “Harold’s rehearsals were like parties, at which he was the guest of honor,” Kazan, who was Clurman’s stage manager on Awake and Sing, said, adding, “He had trouble turning the psychology he had so brilliantly detailed into behavior on the same level of penetration and originality. There was often something inept about his staging; he had trouble getting people in and out of doors. He relied on the actors to work this out.” “I know that Anna would break through his tendency to make a play a bit static or ‘fixed,’ ” Williams told Wood.