by John Lahr
Emotionally and artistically, Merrick and Williams had reached an impasse. That December, with no production scheduled and no director assigned, the momentum of the play seemed to have evaporated. Williams wrote to Kazan for help: “I sensed that you were seriously interested in the play. Of course it would add to my feeling of security—and I am sure of Merrick’s, too—if you would make some sort of commitment, no, I don’t mean commitment but printed statement of ‘involvement’—such as ‘Tennessee is going to Mexico to pull an exciting long play together, and if he is not raped or slaughtered by lascivious and blood-thirsty bandits, I might resume my directorial activity, that is, if Tennessee and I are both convinced that he has pulled the opus together.’—Well, you don’t have to phrase it that eloquently, but some sort of little item in Variety or the Times would vastly increase my momentum and also the public interest.”
But Kazan didn’t take the bait, and Merrick continued to drag his feet. “What’s the matter, David? Don’t you have the money?” St. Just brazenly asked the producer, who, according to his biographer, “seemed to choke on her words.” On August 18, 1974, after Merrick’s option lapsed, Barnes saw the opportunity to jump ship to the team that had just given Williams a spectacular success with a London revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Claire Bloom and directed by Ed Sherin. Hillard Elkins, the revival’s producer, who was then Bloom’s husband, began negotiations for Red Devil, a move that so outraged Merrick that he threatened to sue for breach of contract, until Williams agreed to extend his option. “None of us wanted to be involved in litigation with such a moneyed and powerful man,” he said. In the end, for a while, Merrick and Elkins joined forces. By then, Williams’s director of choice was Sherin, who considered Red Devil “one of the most important works of the decade, with a clear warning about the destructive forces rampant in our society,” but who was unwilling to commit if Merrick was the sole producer. “I felt that David Merrick hadn’t the patience, understanding or compassion to produce this particular work,” Sherin said, who pushed Elkins to do the play alone. Elkins insisted that he could work with Merrick and that Sherin’s feelings “were paranoid.”
Red Devil was scheduled to begin tryouts in Boston in mid-June 1975, then travel to Washington, and open on Broadway in August, with a star-studded cast that included Anthony Quinn, Katy Jurado, and Claire Bloom. Setting off for rehearsals in New York, Williams wrote to St. Just, “I fancy this will be a summer of drama, mostly offstage.” And so it proved. Merrick, who was also acting as the company manager, demanded that the set be redone by a new set designer; the union would not allow the hiring of Mexican mariachis, and the New York variety turned out not to read music; Katy Jurado found it difficult to pronounce or to understand Williams’s words; and Bloom, whose acting style didn’t mix well with Quinn’s, was having trouble finding her character. One afternoon during rehearsals, Quinn took Sherin aside and suggested that “another actress be found or he would leave,” Sherin said, adding, “Four days before we travelled to Boston, the play was unrealized, the acting was uneven, the mariachis were nowhere, but we were going to perform for the public the following Saturday.” At one of these unhappy rehearsals, Merrick put in a rare appearance. “As I live and breathe, it’s Mr. Broadway,” Williams drawled. Merrick shot him a look. “I thought you said you’d be dead before we went into rehearsals,” he said. Williams replied, “Never listen to a duck in a thunderstorm.”
Red Devil didn’t make it to Broadway or even to Washington. Its first Boston preview, on June 14, 1976, was four hours long, and even the director judged it “amateurish, ponderous, inaccurate and incomplete.” When it opened on June 18, critical opinion was mixed, with reactions varying from “a mess” (the Boston Globe) to “cause for rejoicing . . . a haunting theatre piece” (Christian Science Monitor). Nonetheless, the audiences were lively and at near capacity. Then, just as the play was “beginning to emerge,” according to Sherin, Merrick announced that the entire $360,000 investment had been spent and that there might not be enough left over to cover the cost of closing. (According to Sherin, his co-producer subsequently claimed that “only $260,000 or less had been spent.”)
Claire Bloom, Anthony Quinn, and Ed Sherin rehearse The Red Devil Battery Sign
Ostensibly to save the production, Merrick presented a plan that would require the creative team to make drastic cuts to royalties and the actors’ salaries. When Merrick’s numbers were challenged, he refused to show his books and countered with the threat that if his plan was not immediately adopted, he would remove the equipment he personally owned (all the lights and the winches used in set changes). In a late-night eeting that weekend, peace between the management and the cast seemed to be negotiated; but on Merrick’s orders at 7:00 P.M. on Monday, at the beginning of the run’s second week, a closing notice was posted. “I stood in disbelief, before moving on to all the dressing rooms to assure the company that there had been some mistake,” Sherin wrote. “Claire Bloom, who only drinks wine occasionally, was downing a shot of vodka from a freshly opened bottle on her dressing-room table. Anthony Quinn was seething with anger and talked bitterly of a double-cross. The notice must have been all the more bitter for Quinn, when at the final curtain that night, he received a standing ovation for his performance as King.”
That Tuesday, Sherin called Williams to tell him the bad news. “He gave me this shocking report of a statement by Merrick. He declared before witnesses that he had always hated me and the play and that he had only produced it to destroy it. Mr. Sherin is not a man to invent such a story,” Williams wrote in a memo to himself. “If Merrick does indeed think that he has destroyed the play, I think he is totally unaware of my dedication to my work, the tenacity of my resolve to resist its destruction. I have many enemies; but I feel these enemies are greatly out-numbered by those who understand and admire the work which [is?] the heart or truth of my being.” Williams added, “Bill Barnes invited me over last night to inform me of the posted notice. We sat upon his terrace as dusk fell. . . . It was a curiously emotionless occasion.” Other members of the production were not so laid back. Quinn told a reporter, “Tennessee Williams, one of the great talents of all time, has been treated like an assembly-line butcher.” Sherin saw Merrick’s draconian actions as indicative of the ominous undertow of a corrupt culture, “the very forces in our society about which Tennessee Williams is writing in ‘The Red Devil Battery Sign,’ ” he said. “If these forces are already so powerful that they can silence the warnings of our greatest artists, then it may already be too late.”
Red Devil ended its Boston run on June 28, 1975, the first Williams play to close out of town since Battle of Angels, thirty-five years earlier. “It’s not closing for good,” Merrick told a reporter from the New York Times. “It’s closing for bad.” When the play was staged in a tighter, angrier, more political version by the English Theatre in Vienna in 1975—“Burn, burn, burn,” the cast chanted at the finale—it was praised as “one of the most thrilling tragedies of love and hate in Williams’s work” (Frankfurter Allgemeine) and “a blazing torch illuminating the very core of life” (Die Presse). But in the society at which Williams’s howling vision was aimed, Red Devil went unheard and unnoticed.
IN THE YEARS after Red Devil closed—a “coup-de-disgrace,” Williams called it—the playwright felt as if he were vanishing in plain sight. Despite his self-deprecating laughter and his gallant public shows of endurance—“I am like some old opera star who keeps making farewell appearances,” he said—he was fading like a photograph. “Aside from you, the New York Times appears to ignore my continuing efforts and sometimes accomplishments in the theatre,” Williams wrote to Walter Kerr. “I wonder if you might encourage them to give me a sense of continuance. . . . I’m sure you understand my longing for these little reminders . . . that I am still living.” When Roger Stevens, the chairman of the Kennedy Center, called Williams in 1979 to tell him that he was to be celebrated in the second annual Kennedy Center Hon
ors, Williams replied, “Why, Roger, you must think I’m dead.”
Writing in the New York Times in May 1977, Williams noted, “I am widely regarded as the ghost of a writer, a ghost still visible.” The declaration, which was meant to both disabuse and defy his critics, was a brazen maneuver that went well beyond the usual game of show-and-tell that he played with the public. Although his near-death experiences were a frequent part of his public palaver—he was “imminently posthumous,” as he confessed to Dick Cavett in 1979—Williams had never before declared himself dead. For him to admit to his ghostliness in print was a signal of his desperation, as well as his self-loathing.
He did, on occasion, however, play dead. At a boring Key West production of Twelfth Night, Williams extricated himself from his fourth-row center seat before the intermission by gasping loudly, “Help! Get me some medicine! Help!” “I phoned Tennessee to see if he was alright,” William Prosser, the director who was near him, said. “He replied in full health, ‘Oh, you know baby, I never did much like Twelfth Night.’ ” In 1975, dismayed at the early rehearsals of the Vienna version of The Red Devil Battery Sign, Williams had a large oxygen tank brought up to his hotel suite, sent for the leading lady and the director, who were the husband-and-wife owner-managers of the small theater, and pretended to be stricken, “so they might hear the dying playwright’s last words on how the production was killing him,” St. Just, who was present at his performance, said. In his diaries, on December 16, 1976, Peter Hall, then the artistic director of Britain’s Royal National Theatre, reported Williams’s glee at another “death.” “The lady who produced my new play on Broadway organised a seminar,” Williams told Hall. “As I went into the seminar I saw that the notice for closing the play was up on the stage-door notice board. I thought this odd as I was doing the seminar to boost business.” Williams continued, “After the seminar I asked the lady producer why the notice was up. She said she had no more money. I told her this was a shock to me as I had a cardiac condition. I threw myself down on the floor. She screamed and called for a doctor. I rose from the floor roaring with laughter.”
Implicit in the dramaturgy of these scenes was Williams’s almost compulsive desire to compel emotional surrender. “Tenn used death to control the play,” said Rader, who sometimes “played second lead in Tennessee’s death act when we were trying to get drugs from a doctor.” “I saw him use it most in places where he was trying to pick up a reluctant boy who had never heard of him and hoped that an appeal to their common humanity might do the trick. It usually did. It didn’t in the case of Hiram Walker, an actor I knew who told me about it. Tennessee staggered over to the bed and, facing him, rolled his eyes and fell backward on the mattress. ‘Hold me, baby, I’m dying,’ Tenn said. Hiram sat beside him and held Tennessee’s hand, which annoyed him. Hiram asked if he should call the doctor. ‘Doctor? It’s too late for the doctor,’ Tennessee said. ‘Leave! I prefer to die alone.’ ”
For Williams, who claimed to be “inordinately possessed of the past,” playwriting had always been a negotiation with the dead; by calling ghosts out of himself and onto the stage, he allowed them to reenter the realm of time. Now, in his later years, he was haunted not only by the ghosts of others but by the ghost of himself. His plays teemed with apparitions. The resurgence of the spectral in his drama began with two excellent pieces: the poignant teleplay Stopped Rocking (which was never filmed) and Vieux Carré, a memory play about his journeyman days in New Orleans, both of which Williams completed in 1974 as “alternate projects” during the long wait for Red Devil to be mounted.
Stopped Rocking, originally titled “A Second Epiphany for My Friend Maureen,” was written for and dedicated to Maureen Stapleton. The story maps the trajectory into ghostliness of the fragile Janet Svenson, whose husband, Olaf, is having her transferred from the Catholic sanatorium, where she has spent the past five years, to the state mental facility. Since Janet’s hospitalization, Olaf has built a new life and plans to move out of state with his new partner. Guilt-ridden and gauche, he treats Janet as a kind of disembodied figure, at once trapped in time and outside of it. In order to break the news gently to Janet, who still pines for him, Olaf takes her on a tragicomic trailer “holiday” in the Ozarks. On their trip, Olaf and Janet pass through a “spectral country” that is symbolic of the internal retreat that Olaf predicts for her:
No, not alone, with fantasies, apparitions, perfect companions for you. Creatures you invent make no demands on you. You’ll dream your own world, Maw, with complete possession of it. . .
Reality gives no rest, it gives no peace. For you: stopping, resting.
Janet, however, envisions a different form of oblivion. “No more Sunday visits, now, ever, not longer between but never, never ever—those—long words, never ever,” she says in a heartbreaking line that doesn’t move the stolid Olaf. Doomed to a living death, Janet throws herself into a river, only to be saved and stuffed with antidepressants by Olaf, who returns her to the sanatorium and, as the play’s title indicates, to oblivion. In her last close-up, Janet is shown as a kind of disembodied lost soul, “utterly peaceful and ‘resigned from life.’ ” By the end of the play, although he is still moving among the living, Olaf, too, has “stopped rocking.” Olaf, who is nicknamed “Stone Man,” has become one: “stone outside and in, all the way through, in other words, plain heartless.”
Stopped Rocking was proposed as a Hallmark movie of the week. Williams requested John Hancock as the director and met with him in Los Angeles to discuss the script. In the years since Williams had last seen Hancock, he had transitioned from theater to film, directing Sticky My Fingers, Fleet My Feet (1970), a live-action short that was nominated for an Academy Award, and Bang the Drum Slowly (1973), a feature about baseball that gave Robert De Niro his first major role. During his first meeting with Hancock, Williams complained about his physical transformation. According to Hancock, “he told me ruefully how difficult he was finding it to get laid because his body ‘well, isn’t as nice as it once was,’ he said.”
But Hancock came to see that the changes in Williams were more than physical. One night, they ended up at an Italian restaurant on Melrose and Robertson, on the border between Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, because Williams wanted to eat “calamari fritti.” “He was drunk but not out of control,” Hancock recalled. “He was having balance problems as he often did—the synergy, I guess, of downers and booze—and he took my arm to cross the street from the limo to the restaurant. As we approached the far side, there was an opening in the gutter that leads down into those big storm drains that underlie the north-south streets in that area, and, seeing that, he whirled on me with crazed eyes and drew away from me in fear. Later, he confessed that he thought I was going to push him down into the storm drain. I hadn’t realized he was that crazy. It was all chuckled over as if it were some kind of joke, but I remember thinking, Is he still talented enough to be this crazy? I decided he was, but he had greatly changed from the man I’d known earlier.”
In Hancock’s opinion, Williams, in Stopped Rocking, “had written another of his great hysteric females and . . . the madness of the middle-of-the-night camping disasters could provide an opportunity for her to have some spectacular arias.” Hoping to make him see how “skimpy” the middle of the script was and to get him excited about expanding it, Hancock collected a distinguished crew of actors—Richard Jordan, Blair Brown, and Harry Hamlin—to read through a few scenes in Williams’s presence at his Malibu house. “I knew we were in trouble when I saw Tennessee get out of the car and stagger toward the front door,” Hancock said. “Here was a ghost. Bill Barnes was with him. They came in, Tennessee stumbling slightly as he came down the three stairs to our sunken living room, and met everybody.”
The actors were arranged in a circle; Williams sat in a chair, with a well-thumbed copy of the screenplay in his lap. He began to read, slurring wildly. “The actors were stunned, embarrassed. We looked at each other. I didn’t know what to do,�
� Hancock said. “After a page or so I gathered my courage and said, ‘Excuse me, Tennessee, but I don’t think I was clear—we have all these wonderful actors and we want to read the play to you, not you to us.’ ” Williams closed his script, took off his glasses, sat back, and the actors began to read. After a few pages, Hancock looked over at Williams; he was asleep. “Tennessee stirred. Maybe he wasn’t asleep? The actors plowed grimly on. But he was fast asleep,” Hancock recalled. When it was over, Williams mumbled his thank-yous and staggered out to the car. “I never heard from him again,” Hancock said. “Nor, I think, did I see Tennessee ever again, but in a way, he was vanishing even before he had gone.”
VIEUX CARRÉ, A crepuscular spectacle of dead souls, includes among its spectral figures the jejune Writer himself. First conceived as an evening of two one-act plays (The Angel in the Alcove and I Never Get Dressed until after Dark on Sundays), it picks up Williams’s story from the end of The Glass Menagerie and fills in the journeyman years, when he was a nearly destitute twenty-eight-year-old living in a New Orleans boarding house, afflicted by loneliness and by “a passionate will to create.” Beneath its lyric veneer The Glass Menagerie was a battlefield of fierce contending forces: a son trying to break free of a controlling and toxic mother, and a put-upon mother trying to keep her son in place. Vieux Carré, a memory play, has no such urgency or argument. “Once this house was alive, it was occupied once. In my recollection, it still is, but by shadowy occupants like ghosts. Now they enter the lighter areas of my memory,” the Writer/Narrator says in the play’s opening lines.
