Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

by John Lahr

  Given her precarious health, her notorious louche life, her addiction to pills, and her scabrous manner, Bankhead seemed like she was typecast for the role of Mrs. Goforth. In 1962, without Williams’s consent, she had been sent a copy of Milk Train, perhaps because she was—as she recognized—cruelly caricatured in it. “Every good female part you’ve ever written you’ve written for me!” she brayed to the author. She was “more than slightly right,” according to Williams. Of the four roles that Williams acknowledged having based in part on Bankhead—Myra Torrance, Blanche DuBois, Princess Kosmonopolis, and Flora Goforth—she had played only one. The evening she finished reading Milk Train, Bankhead told the actress Eugenia Rawls and her husband, the producer Donald Seawell, who were with her, “Tennessee has written a play that’s absolutely right for me—in fact, he has written it for me and I am going to call him right now and tell him I want to play it.” She placed a call to Key West. “It was an occasion when I might have lied if I had time to think of a lie,” Williams recalled, adding, “So I said: ‘Tallulah, I wrote it for you but it wasn’t ready for you, so I tried it out in Spoleto with an English actress, Hermione Baddeley, and she was so terrific that I staggered into her dressing room after the Spoleto opening, and said, ‘Hermione, this play will be yours if you want it next season on Broadway.’ ” The Seawells couldn’t hear Williams’s words, only Bankhead’s reply to them: “Well, dahling, that’s all right, and I do understand if you’ve promised it to someone else, but you did write it for me, and I just want you to know that if anything happens, I want to play it, and I will someday.”

  Richardson knew next to nothing about Bankhead. Before engaging her for the role, he went to meet her. “I saw exactly what Tennessee meant,” he said. “In appearance and personality, Tallulah was the thing itself: the heavy-lidded, drooping ruins of a proud and striking beauty, with a growl of a voice, worn low by alcohol and cigarettes chain-smoked until she had burnt the flesh of her fingers down from the scarlet-lacquered nails to, quite literally, the bone.” In her prime, Bankhead had memorably created Regina in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes and Sabina in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, but Richardson wasn’t sure she was still up to Flora Goforth. Williams was; he saw Bankhead, after her long, sodden hibernation, being revived by Milk Train, the way Laurette Taylor had been by The Glass Menagerie. After trying and failing to get Katharine Hepburn for the role, Richardson capitulated. “It was either Tallulah or not do it,” he said.

  The price that Richardson extracted for his compromise was the casting of Tab Hunter—the buff, blond, B-movie heart throb, whose cover of “Young Love” had gone to No. 1 on the record charts in 1957—as Chris Flanders, the hustler and “Angel of Death.” “I have spent a sleepless night, the second in a row, examining my conscience about this Tab Hunter business, and now that I have examined my conscience and despaired of getting to sleep, I have risen, more like Lazarus than Jesus, to say that my conscience has said, No, no, no, no, NO!” Williams told Wood. He added, “It’s really a question of whether or not I am a serious writer. If I am a serious writer I can’t give such an intensely seriously created part as that of Flanders to one of those young men who have come into the theatre, if they have come into it, really not by the grace of God but that of Henry Willson. It would be a catastrophic injustice not only to the play, but to Tallulah and Tony and Merrick, to be a party to such a folly.” Even after Hunter was signed, as late as October 31, Williams was badgering Wood to use “your beneficent witch-craft to spare us all the embarrassment of starting rehearsals with Tab Hunter.” “Everyone who mentions the production to me says the same thing,” he wrote. “ ‘Bankhead and Richardson, sounds wonderful, but why Tab Hunter?’ Some even imply that I must have some non-professional attachment to the boy.”

  With Tallulah Bankhead

  Williams even sought his brother’s legal advice on ways to break Hunter’s contract. But, as it turned out, the problem with the second Broadway production of Milk Train was not Hunter, who gave a creditable performance—“YOUR PERFORMANCE IS ONE OF THE MOST DELIGHTFUL SURPRISES OF MY LIFE SINCE I HAD SEEN YOU ONLY IN FILM PARTS THAT GAVE LITTLE INDICATION OF YOUR RANGE AS AN ARTIST,” Williams wired Hunter on December 18, 1963—but Bankhead, who did not.

  Even before they got into the rehearsal room, Bankhead and Richardson were at loggerheads. At a pre-rehearsal cast dinner, thrown by Bankhead at her Fifty-Seventh Street apartment and served by her maid, whom Bankhead referred to as “Cunty,” Richardson found himself blurting, “Fuck you!” to his rebarbative leading lady. The relationship between director and actress was toxic. “Tallulah was the most unpleasant person I’ve ever worked with,” Richardson said. He found the rehearsals—“though they really couldn’t be called that”—“torture.” “On the way to rehearsal I’d have a frantic inner dialogue: ‘I’ve got to find a way to like her, to like something—even to feel sorry for her, feel pity, feel compassion.’ ” Richardson couldn’t relate to Bankhead, or she to him. “Loud or soft—how do you want it?” she’d say when he would try to give her a note. “There wasn’t any choice,” Richardson said. “Tallulah was simply past it. She couldn’t remember, she couldn’t perform.”

  Each morning, Bankhead would hobble into the theater, sit down at a table center stage, and apply makeup to the wreckage of her face, a messy ritual that included smearing her gums with grease, which, she claimed, helped with speech. “Then, like a hideous old vulture on a carrion heap, she’d look around for which of the understudies or assistants had the cleanest newest shirt or sweater, beckon, ‘Come here, darling,’ and wipe her hands on their fresh clothes,” Richardson recalled. She frequently chose for this duty the black actor Bobby Hooks—later the co-founder of the Negro Ensemble Company—who played one of the two Stage Assistants, who move props, comment on the action, and add an Oriental artifice to Williams’s opaque storytelling. At one point, anticipating the segregation problem that awaited them at hotels in Baltimore, where the show was to begin tryouts, Bankhead said to Hooks, “Don’t worry, darling—I’ll say you’re my chauffeur.”

  Bankhead proved to be an equal-opportunity abuser. Marian Seldes, who played Blackie, was frequently dragged to the ladies’ room by Bankhead to run lines with her while she sat on the toilet. From almost the first day, Bankhead took against Hunter, who had the temerity to call her out for her incessant interruptions during rehearsals. “Why the fuck don’t you shut up!” he screamed. As revenge for his insubordination, when asked by a reporter about Hunter’s sexual taste, according to Hunter, Bankhead said, “Tab must be gay—he hasn’t gone down on me.”

  On November 22, 1963, when news of President Kennedy’s assassination drifted into rehearsals, national tragedy trumped theatrical calamity. At first, only the soft, unexplained offstage crying of Ruth Ford, who played the Witch of Capri, was audible. Then the stage manager brought the news to Richardson, who made the announcement to his players. “So that’s what the bitch has been wailing about,” Bankhead screamed. “My daddy was a senaatorrr!” She rushed toward the edge of the stage, threw herself onto her knees, and began to sob. Ford came in from the wings and joined the downstage caterwauling. As Richardson recalled, “In the middle of this, Tennessee arrived, pulling at his little silver pocket-flask of vodka, half in tears, half hysterically giggling, and murmured to me, ‘There, Tony, I told you—Tallulah should have had a frontal lobotomy.’ ”

  “The second Milk Train just about killed me,” Williams wrote to Herbert Machiz, the play’s first director. “I was treated like a dead author, with cuts and transpositions made without any consultation, and Bankhead—well, you must have observed. She didn’t have a chance.” As early as the Baltimore tryouts, the debacle was apparent. “There was no way ‘Milk Train’ should have opened in Baltimore, or anywhere else,” Richardson, who had become “La Richardson” in Williams’s deflated estimation of him, said. “He showed a strange indifference to its disintegration on the road,” Williams wrote. Richards
on couldn’t save the production, and he didn’t want Williams’s help. In a flop sweat, he imposed a cool Kabuki-like style on the play, which lent a strange Brechtian detachment to Williams’s impassioned words. After Williams vociferously objected to some piece of direction, he recalled, Richardson told him, “I don’t think you’re insane but you are a chronic (or natural) hysteric.” In Baltimore, where Merrick joined Richardson and Williams for a crisis meeting, Richardson pleaded with Merrick to close the blighted show. “I think it would kill Tallulah if we closed it,” Williams said.

  So the play staggered onward to Broadway. In the last week of New York previews, Richardson jumped the sinking ship to meet his family in Europe for the holidays. Although this had been contractually agreed upon, his departure was seen as “desertion” by Williams; and, in a way, it was. Richardson didn’t return to New York for the show’s opening on January 1, 1964. Milk Train closed three nights later, after five performances. (“Half the seats in the Brooks Atkinson [Theatre] were empty,” Hunter recalled.) No Williams play had ever received such a crushing rejection. The critics’ gloves were off. “For the kind of playgoer who has hailed Williams the King of Broadway for a dozen years, it was undoubtedly an ordeal of tedium and a sad signal that he may indeed mean to quit,” Newsweek wrote. To The New Yorker, “Miss Bankhead was hoarse and unhappy,” and Hunter was “about as stimulating as the greasy-kid-stuff addict in that television commercial.” Bankhead’s was “not a performance” but an “appearance,” according to the Herald Tribune; as for Hunter, “what vigor he brings with him is born of the gymnasium.”

  Williams’s desolation was so great that he fled immediately back to Key West, leaving his mother and brother, who had flown in from St. Louis for the opening, to fend for themselves in New York. “I felt very badly about leaving New York before Mother left,” Williams wrote to Dakin. “But I was simply unable to endure another day in that place, after the fate of ‘Milk Train II.’ ” He added, “Everything has gone so wrong this year that the time to come could hardly be anything but better. I try to keep in mind that Chinese philosophy ‘Mei you Guanchi,’ ‘no sweat,’ but it’s been really tough going.”

  Williams subsequently claimed that Merlo’s death was the catastrophe that precipitated his seven-year depression—his “Stoned Age,” as he called it. He likened his collapse to the slow-motion destruction of a building by dynamite. “It occurred in protracted stages, but the protraction gave it no comfort,” he said. The loss of Merlo certainly shook him; the real unmooring catastrophe, however, was the loss of his literary power, that sure connection to the green world of his imagination. “The colored lights” that had sustained him since childhood were starting to flicker. “I work but I have no faith left in what I am doing,” he wrote to Lanier in January 1964, three weeks after Milk Train’s second humiliating collapse. He added, “I work too much under liquor that kills the critical sense for a couple of hours and gives the illusion of doing what you’re not really doing.”

  “I am floundering in the boon-docks of my life and at the present time, I see no way out,” a grim Williams wrote to Nicklaus in April, who was now more or less living a separate life. “Must try to believe there is one, besides the last one.” He added, “Gloom is heavy and tiresome. I must discard it somehow or no one will be able to bear me.” Entombed in grief, unable to write or to reach out to friends, Williams hid himself away in Key West. Marion Vaccaro was enlisted to keep him company; in May, she camped out at Duncan Street, a stay that seemed to her like “an extended visit to Grant’s Tomb.” “I came for a weekend and have been here over 2 weeks,” she wrote to the producer Chuck Bowden, another of Williams’s stonewalled but stalwart friends. “Every time I plan to go back to Miami, he says, ‘Wait till tomorrow.’ . . . Every night we plan to go out to dinner, he backs out and says, ‘Let’s have a sandwich here.’ . . . Between us, we fix lunch, listen to the news on TV, and those fascinating ‘Search for Tomorrow’ soap operas, and commercials with the sound turned off. We have been out to dinner three times—and once in a while for a late swim—only wish I knew what to do—hate to leave him here but can’t stay indefinitely—since apparently I am no solution. . . . Tom looks fine—outside—it’s something else—and I am not the answer, even if he does hold on to me.”

  Williams may have been uncommunicative with his friends, but they communicated their worries to one another. “I have been hoping each day that there would be some word from Tenn that would open the door to him so I could be of some help,” Bowden wrote to Vaccaro in mid-June. “If I call him outright I am afraid he will react against us—more importantly you—feeling that we are ganging up against him. . . . I am afraid to make bad matters worse if I force much harder at the moment.”

  Even the novelty of summer travel couldn’t shake Williams’s depression. With Vaccaro in tow, he spent three weeks in Barcelona and a month in Tangiers. “He was in such a depressed condition that I hesitated to leave him,” Vaccaro wrote to Henry Field, a Miami psychotherapist whom Williams knew. “Apparently there was no one he could put up with, and he was frightened of being alone. I stayed near, but there were days when we scarcely spoke, beyond ‘good morning,’ ‘What shall we have for supper.’ ” She added, “I wonder if I was any help at all. . . . He had been talking so much of doing away with himself that I simply couldn’t just go away and leave him in his black world.”

  On his return to New York, Williams learned that in his absence the Sixty-Fifth Street apartment, which he’d shared with Merlo, had been looted twice; he moved into a duplex next to City Center on Fifty-Fifth Street. Williams took the seventeenth floor; his roommate on the sixteenth floor was his young Tennessee cousin, Jim Adams, who was studying ballet and the dramatic arts. Adams, whom Williams said had been “bitten by the culture bug on both cheeks of the ass,” suggested Williams see his analyst Ralph Harris. In the first few months of treatment, even though he was living a celibate life, visiting Harris at eight every morning Monday through Friday, and going to bed by 10:30 every night, Williams exhibited signs of breakdown. The symptoms—insomnia, loss of curiosity, loss of sex drive—were sufficiently serious for Harris to monitor him over the weekends. “He calls me up on Saturday and Sunday to check on my mental and physical state, too,” Williams wrote to Paul Bowles that September. “He is very anxious for me to resume some kind of sex-life but I have no interest in it, it seems like something I’d never heard of.”

  When he felt he needed to lift his spirits, Williams popped Elavil, an antidepressant. “To believe in pills you have to believe in magic, but maybe they do help a bit and I have always clung to some belief in magic,” he told Bowles. “Tom came here to dinner, alone, on Monday,” Bowden’s wife, the actress Paula Laurence, reported to Vaccaro in mid-September. “I think he looks better—slimmer—and I think he is better. Not happier, but more open and inclined to talk about how he feels. He goes to the doctor every day and swims and did some excellent work on the plays”—The Gnadiges Fraulein and The Mutilated. (Williams had returned to rewriting two one-act plays he’d written in 1962, under the collective title Slapstick Tragedy.) Bowden, Laurence explained, was planning to produce them, for a February opening. By late January, Williams was writing to St. Just about the double-bill. “I am going into rehearsal in a couple of weeks with a couple of very odd plays,” he wrote. “I don’t suppose the critics or public will know what to make of them, and I can’t say that I do either. But it is better to be occupied with something rather than with nothing.” By the end of the month, however, Bowden postponed the show. He was unable to raise enough money for a Williams production, even with major theatrical talent—Alan Schneider, Margaret Leighton, Kate Reid, and Zoe Caldwell—attached. Williams now had to face a harrowing new prospect: not only had he lost his inspiration, he seemed to have lost his audience.

  Williams first found his audience as the Second World War was ending. In 1945, The Glass Menagerie’s elegiac tone of promise and regret caught the wave of hist
ory and rode it to glory. Almost twenty years to the month later, Slapstick Tragedy caught the undertow. America was back at war, fighting an undeclared battle both abroad and at home, and wartime was no time for Williams’s particular brand of talent, as he himself had shrewdly concluded as early as 1940. War terrified and isolated the country, making it increasingly suspicious of ambiguity and resistant to thought. “We are not soft people and the war is making us even harder,” Williams had written to Mary Hunter in 1943. “There is a great deal of pity and tenderness in all of us, but when a certain balance is broken by things that create exhaustion, I think the underground devils come out—which makes for naked and savage kinds of creation.”

  Like the citizens invoked in the prologue of The Glass Menagerie—“matriculating in a school for the blind . . . having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy”—Americans of the floundering, bewildered sixties had their fingers forcibly pressed down on a social fabric that was unraveling under the pressure of racial unrest, radical political protest, and social, cultural, and aesthetic upheaval. “We are on the verge of Armageddon and await an apocalypse,” the usually even-handed Harold Clurman, dean of American theater critics and co-founder of the Group Theatre, noted in the Nation in 1967. The theatrical paroxysm—whether the grimace of laughter that refused suffering (Joe Orton, Charles Ludlam’s Theater of the Ridiculous), violent physical transformation (Jerzy Grotowski), startling enactments of rebirth (Sam Shepard, the Living Theatre, the Open Theatre), or the absurdist context of no context (Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter, and so on)—held up a mirror to the desperation of the times. To more overtly political playwrights, such as Arthur Miller, this agitation signaled a “thrilling alienation.” “Once again we were looking almost completely outside ourselves for salvation from ourselves,” he wrote in Timebends. “In the absolutely right and necessary rebellion was only a speck of room for worrying about personal ethics and our own egoism.”