Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh
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133 “We all went to the show”: KAL, p. 340.
133 “It has been a pretty fabulous time”: Williams to Donald Windham, July 29, 1947, TWLDW, p. 202.
133 drawn up on July 19, 1947: Contract on file in ISC.
133 “about the biggest headache”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Aug. 25, 1947, L2, p. 115.
133 “much pressure from Greek headquarters”: Irene Selznick memo to Irving Schneider, July 28, 1947, ISC.
133 “Kazan tried to persuade me”: Irene Selznick to Irving Schneider, July 2, 1947, ISC.
134 “I therefore had a final luncheon”: Ibid.
134 “I entered the agreement with Selznick”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Aug. 25, 1947, L2, p. 115.
134 “To lose him now”: Irving Schneider telegram to Irene Selznick, Sept. 15, 1947, ISC.
135 “low as a snake”: Irene Selznick to Irving Schneider, Aug. 18, 1947, ISC.
135 “I HAVE GARFIELD-ITIS”: Irene Selznick telegram to Irving Schneider, Aug. 19, 1947, ISC.
135 “a minute on the stage”: Margorie Loggia and Glenn Young, eds., The Collected Works of Harold Clurman: Six Decades of Commentary on Theatre, Dance, Music, Film, Arts, and Letters (New York: Applause Books, 1994), p. 977.
135 “I don’t think he ever did anything better”: Ibid.
135 “That boy’s having a convulsion!”: Patricia Bosworth, Marlon Brando (New York: Viking, 2001), p. 31.
135 “There was nothing you could do”: Young, Kazan, p. 81.
136 “He even listened experientially”: Ibid., p. 83. “His performance was full of surprises and exceeded what Williams and I had expected,” Kazan wrote.
136 “There are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people”: Williams to Elia Kazan, Apr. 19, 1947, L2, p. 95.
136 “epochal”: New York Times, July 2, 2004.
136 “Gadg and Irene both said”: Brando with Lindsey, Brando, p. 118.
136 “a size too large”: Sam Staggs, When Blanche Met Brando: The Scandalous Story of “A Streetcar Named Desire” (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005), p. 31.
136 “The line was busy”: Ibid.
136 “a shot in the dark”: KAL, p. 342.
136 “That’s all I said”: Ibid., p. 341.
137 “domestic cataclysm”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Aug. 29, 1947, L2, p. 119.
137 blackout during the Wingfields’ supper: Ibid.
137 “into everlasting darkness”: Ibid.
137 “It was all too much for Pancho”: Ibid.
137 “He was just about the best-looking”: M, p. 131.
137 “You’d think he had spent”: CWTW, p. 204.
137 “just as he played it”: Ibid.
137 “I was the antithesis of Stanley Kowalski”: Brando with Lindsey, Brando, pp. 121–22.
137 “Get Kazan on the phone!”: M, p. 131.
137 “A new value came out”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Aug. 29, 1947, L2, pp. 118–19. Brando was signed within four days; on September 3, 1947, his photo and the news of his signing ran for the first time in the New York Times.
137 “smiled a little”: M, p. 131.
137 “Things were so badly arranged”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Aug. 29, 1947, L2, p. 118.
138 “God-sent”: Ibid.
138 “When an actor has as good a play”: Brando with Lindsey, Brando, p. 122.
138 peculiar shyness: M, p. 132. “Brando was always shy with me for some reason,” Williams wrote.
138 “And so we did—in silence”: Ibid.
138 “I am hoping he will go home”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Aug. 29, 1947, L2, p. 119.
138 “It took some doing”: M, p. 134.
138 “quite gratefully so”: Ibid.
138 over a hundred line changes: Brenda Murphy, Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan: A Collaboration in the Theatre (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 22.
138 “There is still something too cut-and-dried”: Williams to Irene Selznick, Sept. 8, 1947, L2, p. 123.
139 “dim white against the fading dusk”: Williams, “Poker Night,” HRC.
139 “Now, now, love”: LOA1, p. 564.
139 “fidelity”: Williams to Elia Kazan, Apr. 19, 1947, L2, p. 96.
139 “After this experience”: KAL, p. 353.
139 “Probably I would want him back”: Williams to Donald Windham, Mar. 26, 1947, TWLDW, p. 197.
139 “He needed me as much as I needed him”: LLI with Pancho Rodriguez, 1983, LLC.
139 “I cannot find words”: Williams to Margo Jones, Oct. 1947, L2, p. 128.
139 “Today I am particularly aware”: N, Oct. 20, 1947, p. 463.
139 “I wish I could write you”: Williams to Pancho Rodriguez, Oct. 1947, L2, p. 126.
140 “Reisito, Torito”: Ms. “Memoirs,” p. 61.
140 “Unable to break down the door”: M, p. 135.
140 “I am terribly troubled”: Williams to Margo Jones, Oct. 1947, L2, p. 129.
140 “He was like a father”: LLI with Pancho Rodriguez, 1983, LLC.
140 “to take a man’s place in the world”: Williams to Pancho Rodriguez, Nov. 1947, L2, p. 131.
140 “This play is hardly your dish”: Williams to Edwina Williams, Nov. 1947, ibid., p. 133.
140 “I shall not listen to any moral homilies”: Ibid.
140 “Life is hard”: Williams to Pancho Rodriguez, Nov. 1947, L2, p. 130.
141 “had been persuaded”: M, p. 135.
141 Pancho moved back in with him: Williams to Margo Jones, Oct. 1947, L2, p. 129.
141 last scene mounted for the first time: “Gadg’s method is to stage one new scene each day and to go over all the preceding scenes in sequence,” Williams wrote Jones. “Tomorrow, Monday, he will stage the final, eleventh scene, which I think is the crucial one.” (Williams to Margo Jones, Oct. 1947, L2, p. 128.)
141 “My feeling for P. has more or less”: N, Oct. 27, 1947, pp. 465–67.
141 “I thought, privately, this character”: M, p. 136.
141 “But people are complex, Thorn”: As quoted by Kim Hunter, in Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer, eds., It Happened on Broadway: An Oral History of the Great White Way (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998), p. 7.
141 “a performance miracle in the making”: KAL, p. 343.
142 “Because it was out of balance”: Brando with Lindsey, Brando, p. 124.
143 “I looked to my authority”: KAL, p. 344.
143 “If Tennessee was Blanche”: Ibid., pp. 347, 350.
143 “is attracted to a murderer”: Young, Kazan, pp. 83–84.
143 “fearsome commotion”: KAL, pp. 346–47.
143 “I left New York two or three weeks”: LLI with Pancho Rodriguez, 1983, LLC.
143 “I used to try and hurt him”: Ibid.
144 “. . . I have never said”: Williams to Pancho Rodriguez, Nov. 1947, L2, p. 132.
144 “I knew that he loved me”: LLI with Pancho Rodriguez, 1983, LLC.
144 “as if a ghost sat over the affairs”: Williams to Elia Kazan, Apr. 19, 1947, L2, p. 96.
144 “When you see that someone needs peace”: Williams to Pancho Rodriguez, Nov. 1947, L2, pp. 130–31. “Right after Frank Merlo’s death, Tennessee came back to New Orleans to ask me to go live with him again,” Rodriguez said. (LLI with Pancho Rodriguez, 1983, LLC.)
145 “Stanley (M.B.) like E.K.”: Bosworth, Marlon Brando, p. 46.
145 “the lame duck in the line-up”: Williams to Margo Jones, Oct. 1947, L2, p. 128.
145 “What we’ve got here is oysters”: Peter Manso, Brando: The Biography (New York: Hyperion, 1994), p. 231.
145 “RIDE OUT BOY”: Williams telegram to Marlon Brando, HRC.
145 “Streetcar opened last night”: Williams to James Laughlin, Dec. 4, 1947, L2, pp. 133–34.
145 others and so on: Also at the opening night were Cary Grant, Paul Muni, Montgomery Clift, Edward G. Robinson, Olivia de Havilland, Lillian Hellman, Moss Hart, Ruth Gordon, Garson Kanin, and Josh Logan.
146 “t
he flag of beauty”: Arthur Miller, “Introduction,” in Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (New York: New Directions, 2004), p. xii.
146 “Southern genital-man”: Alan Sinfield, Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theater in the 20th Century (Bath, U.K.: Bath Press, 1999), p. 89.
146 “The play might well have been titled”: Theatre Book of the Year 1947–1948 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), pp. 163–66.
146 “In 1947, when Marlon Brando appeared”: Vidal, “Tennessee Williams,” p. 61.
146 “Stanley Kowalski changed the concept of sex”: JLI with Gore Vidal, 2000, JLC.
146 “He builds a hedonistic life”: Elia Kazan, An American Odyssey, ed. Michel Ciment (London: Bloomsbury, 1988), p. 184.
146 “I am the king around here”: LOA1, p. 537.
149 “Tenn, are you really happy?”: Life, Dec. 15, 1948.
150 Williams won the Pulitzer Prize: Audrey Wood to Irene Selznick, May 3, 1947, ISC: “Dear Woman of the Year—“It’s all beautiful and like a fairy tale. This is the way we both dreamt it could be and seeing a dream come true is more dramatic than the play itself. We are both so proud and happy you were chosen to be the mid-wife.”
150 rumbled by most of the critics: “I am afraid Margo did a rather mediocre job,” Williams wrote to Donald Windham. “Not inspired. Not vital, as Kazan would have been and as the play so dreadfully needed.” (Oct. 19, 1948, TWLDW, p. 225.)
150 “the critics who gave us the two worst notices”: Williams to Donald Windham, Oct. 19, 1948, TWLDW, p. 226.
150 “The party was really swell”: Ibid., p. 225.
150 “I enjoyed the ride”: Ibid., p. 226. Jane and Tony Smith, Sandy Campbell, Joanna Albus.
CHAPTER 3: THE EROTICS OF ABSENCE
151 Erotics of Absence: The phrase was coined by Christopher Bollas in Hysteria; it is used here with his permission.
151 “The desiring fingers”: RS, pp. 70–71.
151 “My writing dealt with you”: Franz Kafka, Letter to His Father (London: Oneworld, 2008), p. 56.
151 as an adult, and he was going solo: At seventeen, in 1928, Williams traveled for two months in Europe with his grandfather.
151 “I don’t intend to get seriously involved”: Williams to Oliver Evans, Feb. 11, 1948, L2, p. 165.
151 two thousand dollars a week in royalties: Tennessee Williams, “Night Passage” (unpublished), p. 11, LLC.
151 “My nights have been wild”: Williams to Margo Jones, Dec. 31, 1947, L2, p. 141.
152 “a packing-bee”: Ibid., p. 140.
152 “Sartre did not show up”: Williams to Donald Windham, July 25, 1948, TWLDW, p. 223.
152 “cold, bad food”: Williams to Donald Windham, Jan. 17, 1948, ibid., p. 205.
152 press interviews in his hotel bathtub: M, p. 140.
152 “I found nothing very good about Paris”: Williams to Elia Kazan, Jan. 25, 1948, WUCA.
152 “The sun—glorious sun”: N, Jan. 27, 1948, p. 469.
153 “the capitol of my heart”: Williams to Oliver Evans, Jan. 31, 1948, L2, p. 155.
153 “Here in Italy”: Williams to Carson McCullers, Feb. 8, 1948, ibid., p. 160.
153 “soft city”: RS, p. 9.
153 “They do not hate Americans”: Williams to Brooks Atkinson, Mar. 29, 1948, L2, p. 177.
153 “I haven’t the slightest idea”: Williams to Elia Kazan, Jan. 25, 1948, WUCA.
153 “under the moon of pause”: RS, p. 51.
153 “Sometimes the lamp burns very low”: Williams to Carson McCullers, Mar. 1, 1948, L2, p. 170.
153 “the trapeze of the flesh”: Hart Crane, “The Bridge” (1930): “the empty trapeze of the flesh.”
153 “You can’t walk a block without being accosted”: Williams to Donald Windham, Feb. 20, 1948, TWLDW, p. 207.
153 “In the evenings, very late”: Williams to Jane Lawrence Smith, June 29, 1950, L2, p. 328.
153 “The nightingales busted their larynx!”: Williams to Oliver Evans, Jan. 31, 1948, ibid., p. 155.
154 “turned into orgies”: Williams to Donald Windham, Mar. 9, 1948, TWLDW, p. 210.
154 “that unhappy young egotist Gore Vidal”: Williams to James Laughlin, May 18, 1948, L2, pp. 192–93.
154 “I shall remember all of them”: Ibid.
155 “back under the dining-room table”: John Updike, Self-Consciousness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), pp. 252–53.
155 “Italy has been a real experience”: Williams to James Laughlin, May 18, 1948, L2, p. 193.
155 “Being successful and famous”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Dec. 5, 1948, ibid., p. 217.
155 “You know, then, that the public Somebody”: “On a Streetcar Named Success,” New York Times, Nov. 30, 1947, as quoted in NSE, p. 35. (The essay title was later changed to “The Catastrophe of Success.”)
155 “as nervous as a cat”: Williams to Carson McCullers, June 18, 1948, L2, p. 196.
155 “I am quite forlorn here”: Williams to Donald Windham, July 9, 1948, TWLDW, p. 222.
155 “To really appreciate Italy fully”: Williams to Donald Windham, June 22, 1948, ibid., p. 220.
156 “I don’t want the beautiful effect”: Sheridan Morley, John Gielgud: The Authorized Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), p. 199.
156 “He is too English, too stylish”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Apr. 24, 1948, L2, p. 185.
156 “frightfully nervous high-handed prima donna”: Williams to Audrey Wood, June 13, 1948, ibid., p. 198.
156 “the Old One”: Sheridan Morley, John G: The Authorized Biography of John Gielgud (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2001), p. 199.
156 “John G. says I should not take a bow”: Williams to Maria Britneva, July 18, 1948, FOA, p. 3.
156 “I want everybody to see”: Helen Hayes, My Life in Three Acts (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), p. 168.
156 “She was everything I disliked”: Ibid.
157 “She’s spearing a shrimp”: JLI with Gore Vidal, 2006, JLC.
157 “I do not altogether understand myself”: Williams to Helen Hayes, July 30, 1948, L2, p. 205.
157 “compensations”: Williams to Maria Britneva, July 30, 1948, FOA, p. 5.
157 “She scared people”: John Lahr, “The Lady and Tennessee,” The New Yorker, Dec. 19, 1994, p. 78.
157 “her spectacular velocity through time”: Ibid.
157 “She was extraordinary”: Ibid., p. 83.
157 “desperate grip”: Kazan, quoted in FOA, p. ix.
157 “She is full of a good kind of mischief”: Williams to Carson McCullers, June 18, 1949, L2, p. 256.
158 “I am quite incapable of learning”: Williams to Audrey Wood, June 13, 1948, ibid., p. 199. Describing sharing the same room with his lover and Jones on a Jeep trip to Capri and Sorrento, Williams wrote about his Italian lover’s bewilderment at Jones’s apparent indifference to the Italian landscape. “ ‘This donna molto strana. This donna like parlare, like mangiare, like drink, pero no like amore, no like poesia!’ However this donna is very useful and obliging in such matters as packing for trips and making arrangements. We have our tickets and reservations straight through to London without my lifting a finger.” (Williams to Donald Windham, June 7, 1948, TWLDW, p. 219.)
158 British reviews: “The press is the worst the play has ever been given anywhere in Europe,” Williams wrote Britneva. (July 30, 1948, FOA, p. 4.)
158 “Somehow I cannot make plans”: Williams to Maria Britneva, July 30, 1948, FOA, p. 5.
158 “my bosom was too big”: Lahr, “Lady and Tennessee,” p. 78.
159 “shot by the Soviets”: Ibid.
159 revised or fabricated history: Ibid.
159 “I feel sorry for Maria”: Williams to Donald Windham, May 8, 1949, TWLDW, p. 241.
159 “I felt I was in a state of grace”: Lahr, “Lady and Tennessee,” p. 80.
159 “When Edith Evans”: Ibid., p. 79.
160 “She wasn’t a good actress”: Ibid.
160 “eighteen or
nineteen”: Ibid.
160 “I was invited to this wonderful party”: Ibid.
160 “Maria ate and ate”: Ibid.
160 “five o’clock angel”: Feb. 2, 1952, FOA, p. 52.
160 “Word has reached here”: Truman Capote to Donald Windham and Sandy Campbell, ca. Mar. 25, 1949, in Truman Capote, Too Brief a Treat: Letters of Truman Capote, ed. Gerald Clarke (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 69.
162 “savagely mordant sense of humor”: FOA, p. xiv.
162 “You seem to say all the things”: Williams to Maria Britneva, Feb. 7, 1949, ibid., p. 13.
162 “Tennessee, with a glint of malice”: Ibid., p. 10.
162 “We were fighting”: Williams to Brooks Atkinson, June 1954, L2, p. 533.
162 “Total autonomy”: Sweet Tornado: Margo Jones and the American Theater, DVD, directed by A. Dean Bell, Kay Cattarulla, and Rob Trachin (KERA-TV, PBS, 2006).
162 “If you want to (dare to) bring up”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Apr. 2, 1948, L2, p. 178.
163 “I expressed my doubts to Tennessee”: RBAW, p. 157.
163 “did, as usual, the gentlemanly thing”: Ibid.
163 “She was the con of cons”: Sweet Tornado, DVD.
163 “The tragedy is that her performance”: Williams to Brooks Atkinson, June 1954, L2, p. 533.
163 more removed proscenium: Four years later, José Quintero’s production of Summer and Smoke, starring Geraldine Page, at New York’s new Circle in the Square, redeemed the play’s critical reputation. “Nothing more momentous has happened in the theatre in the last few years than the revival of Summer and Smoke,” Atkinson wrote in the New York Times.
163 “began to have depressing premonitions”: M, p. 153.
163 “the work of a dying man”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Mar. 23, 1949, L2, p. 239.
163 “I had been ill at the time”: Williams to Brooks Atkinson, June 1954, ibid., pp. 533–34.
163 “In my opinion Margo Jones”: M, p. 153.
163 “I was onstage playing the scene”: Sweet Tornado, DVD.
164 “Margo Jones’s Farewell Address to the Troops”: RBAW, p. 158.
164 “A pretentious and amateurish bore”: Howard Barnes, New York Herald Tribune, Oct. 7, 1948.