I was most drawn to the pictures. The walls were covered with them, portraits of Helen at various points in her legendary career. She’d been on the stage since she was a toddler and had triumphed in a constellation of roles from flappers to matrons to Shakespearean heroines and Chekhovian old maids. There was a particularly fascinating series of photographs charting her remarkable performance as Victoria Regina; she had played the long-lived British monarch from girlhood to widowhood, aging visibly through the magic of makeup.
Soon we sat out in the garden near a swimming pool. A maid served us tea. Helen took a delicate sip. “Kate Hepburn once swan-dived into that pool,” she announced. “Kate liked to show off.”
We hadn’t mentioned The Glass Menagerie. I longed to hear what she had to say about this great play, which had revolutionized the theatre with its lyricism and poetry, its insistence that memory could be a force of gravity. I assumed we were to read one of the mother/daughter scenes from the play. I’d even memorized a scene. I pulled a copy of the script from my bag and was about to say something when Lils put a finger to her lips. I kept quiet as Helen nattered on.
“I enjoy going to Palm Beach in winter. The weather will be wonderful. Paul Crabtree will be directing and playing the Gentleman Caller. Will Hare will be Tom. Lils tells me he’s a member of the Actors Studio, so you will feel comfortable.”
I nodded. Will was a kindly, burly journeyman actor who worked frequently on projects in session and was full of advice to all the younger Studio members.
Then Helen looked at me. “I phoned the Theatre Guild and spoke to Lawrence Langner. He saw you in Blue Denim and thought you were quite marvelous. And with my darling Lils’s recommendation . . .” She reached out a small hand. “I am so glad we will be working together.”
IT WAS SETTLED. Just like that. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. But then everything in the last six months had been unreal—becoming a lifetime member of the Actors Studio, playing Janet in Blue Denim, and now I was about to inhabit Laura in The Glass Menagerie. For the next month I prepared, researching and taking notes.
The Glass Menagerie is Tennessee Williams at his most autobiographical. In it, as the narrator Tom, he tells the story of his miserable life in a St. Louis tenement supporting a controlling mother, Amanda, and a delicate reclusive sister, Laura, by working in a shoe factory. Both Tom and Laura have unending battles with Amanda. All Tom wants to do is escape from his family so he can write.
Laura had been inspired by Williams’s sister Rose, a pathologically shy girl whom he was close to. I related to the character of Laura and related to how she loved her brother. I imagined she hated fighting with her mother as much as I did. I understood her fantasies, her need to abandon reality and move into the make-believe world she’d created with her sparkling glass animals.
Every so often I’d go to the Studio to attend sessions. Once I bumped into a disheveled Tennessee Williams, hair awry, wearing clothes that looked as if he’d slept in them. He was on the way to watch Kazan improvise with Carroll Baker and Eli Wallach for Baby Doll, his latest movie project. How I longed to buttonhole him and ask him questions about his sister, but I didn’t say a word.
Rose would be the model for at least fifteen characters in various Williams plays. But first he’d immortalized her as Laura, so I concentrated on thinking about her.
OVER CHRISTMAS, MAMA and Daddy gave their annual San Francisco “exiles” party; it had become something of a tradition and they looked forward to seeing their transplanted California friends who were now living and working in New York. Some of them were still homesick for the mild weather, the fog, the vista from the hills, the great blue bay.
The Roger Laphams came, and Paul Smith, editor of Collier’s. There were others but all I remember was being introduced to an impressive young man named Mel Arrighi. He towered over me, very tall and very handsome in his cheap, ill-fitting suit, horn-rimmed glasses covering acute gray eyes, rumpled curly brown hair. His classic good looks reminded me of the poet Robert Lowell. I told him that and he shrugged, embarrassed.
“Yeah, so I’ve heard,” he admitted, barely getting the words out. I tried to ask him other questions and he seemed unable to answer. His hesitant manner of speech, almost a stammer—although he could also speak with great force—suggested a discomfort in his own skin. Nick Lothar, a friend from San Francisco who’d brought Mel to the party, ultimately answered some of my questions for him, but as soon as we sat down to dinner—and we sat next to each other—I found out a great deal more.
We discovered we were exactly the same age, twenty-four. Mel was a playwright, a novelist, and an actor. He’d been about to teach at New York University when he auditioned for the Lunts and was soon to go on tour with them in The Great Sebastians.
He told me he’d been born and raised in California and had attended Reed College. Yes, he said quietly, he’d heard about my brother’s death, but they had never met. He added he was sorry for my loss. He said it so compassionately my eyes filled with tears. Then he added that he had a brother to whom he was very close but this brother was now sick and living with their mother back in San Francisco. I changed the subject and asked where he lived in New York.
“In the Village.” At the moment he was sharing an apartment with the painter Paul Resika. They were so poor they often existed on cornflakes, he joked. Sometimes not even that. To pay the rent, he was a play reader for the William Morris Agency. What excited him most was working with Joe Papp. Papp had recently founded a Shakespeare Workshop housed in a church basement on the Lower East Side. He’d gathered a band of ragtag actors, Mel among them, and they were doing readings of Romeo and Juliet and Two Gentlemen of Verona. Papp’s goal was to bring free Shakespeare to the masses, but so far there was no press about it. Mel added that he’d acted in Shakespeare a lot at UC-Berkeley, where he’d transferred in his junior year. He’d been taught by John Barton, one of England’s foremost authorities in classical theatre.
After dinner he excused himself; he had an early rehearsal. He said he hoped I could see him in one of Joe Papp’s productions when I returned from The Glass Menagerie.
I replied I would like to, very much.
Then he added, “I think you will be very good as Laura.” He was no longer stammering.
As he walked out the door, I looked after him with interest. He was attempting to do everything just the way I was. He was trying to succeed as a writer and an actor. I wanted to see him again.
WILL HARE AND I both took the early flight to Palm Beach. We were playing brother and sister in Glass Menagerie, so we hoped to get to know each other a bit on the plane. But Will was hungover and I was so shaken by a fight I’d had with my mother that we barely spoke. At least we’d be on time for the first read-through; it had been scheduled for one p.m.
We were driven directly from the airport to the playhouse through a blinding hot sun. Along the way we passed palatial homes decorated with reindeer and Santa Claus figurines on emerald-green lawns. In the distance I saw a strip of ocean.
The director, Paul Crabtree, greeted us in the lobby. A polite gentleman in a seersucker jacket, he spoke in a thick Southern drawl. All around him people were pushing and shoving to get in the long line forming at the box office. As soon as Helen’s name was announced, her fans had come in droves to buy tickets. The Glass Menagerie would be completely sold out for its weeklong run over Christmas and New Year’s.
Paul guided us backstage. Helen was already in the wings, perched on a camp chair knitting. When she saw us, she called out a welcome. As introductions were made, her eyes twinkled behind steel-rimmed glasses. She radiated a buoyant supreme confidence. I noticed she was wearing navy blue tennis shoes.
The formalities over, Paul signaled the stage manager, and within minutes we were seated at a long table with pitchers of ice water at each end. There were no opening remarks. We began a read-through of the play. As it proceeded, Helen plunged into the role of Amanda Wingfield with an electr
ic excitement that left everyone else at the table a bit stunned. She seemed to be giving the performance of her life that sultry morning—wheedling, badgering, ordering her son, Tom, to find a gentleman caller for Laura, her daughter, to save her from spinsterhood.
At our lunch break Will warned me that Helen’s portrayal of the foolish but indomitable Amanda would probably remain the same at every rehearsal and throughout the run. “Some stars are like that,” he explained. “They set their performances in stone early on. It may drive us crazy, but we will use it.”
And use it we did, although I for one was so intimidated by Helen’s assured external technique—in direct contrast to my more naturalistic internal one—that I didn’t come into my own as Laura until after the dress rehearsal.
Helen had already starred in London as Amanda to great success. But she would tell me she could never come close to Laurette Taylor, who’d originated the role and had been unforgettable. Helen was a modest and down-to-earth soul. It was sometimes hard to believe that this diminutive woman was considered one of the greatest actresses of the twentieth century, with theatres named after her. She was pleased I was a Catholic and I would soon accompany her to Mass. She lit a candle for her departed daughter, Mary, every day.
AFTER PAUL BLOCKED the play and set our moves, we ran through it over and over for the next week. There was never any discussion about the scenes or notes given about our characters. When Paul wasn’t being the Gentleman Caller, he’d sit out front in the house, letting us find our way into the remarkable story of a family whose lives form a triangle of quiet desperation. Somehow this Glass Menagerie directed itself; the language and poetry carried us along.
After rehearsals Will and I would work on our own. We’d have supper in the Barn Grill near us and then go back to our boardinghouse by the ocean and run lines. Sometimes we’d create subtexts, imagined thoughts and feelings that go underneath the dialogue. Sometimes we’d improvise. I was positive Tom and Laura felt like doubles. They finished each other’s sentences; each knew what the other was thinking, as I used to long ago with Bart.
Before I left New York I’d found a snapshot of my brother and me taken when I was six and he was four. We are standing in front of our Berkeley house. I am in sunlight; Bart, pudgy and solemn, in shadow. Our nanny often took us for walks up into the hills behind the university. Williams and his sister also took walks when they were small and living in St. Louis, and they played together, told each other stories, shared secrets.
“You and I are the same person, only different,” Will would say of us as Laura and Tom.
We would work until midnight, and were so keyed up that we couldn’t sleep, so we’d wander down to the beach and watch the waves break onto the sand. We never talked about whether what we’d been doing was deepening our performances or making us come more alive onstage, because we didn’t know. I was beginning to realize that the secret of acting is that it cannot be explained. I would never be able to say how I accomplished what I did. I knew only that Will was everything to me in that part. Relating to him, to that perspiring, kind, ruddy face of his, made all the difference. In connecting to others on stage you are halfway there.
THAT’S WHAT WAS so difficult about acting with Helen. During dress rehearsal we would be having a dialogue, and although she seemed to be looking at me, she wasn’t seeing me, and that was unsettling. It was the main difference in the way we behaved onstage. I made myself look at Helen and see her, but after a while her commanding and theatrical voice threatened to imprison me. By the end of the dress rehearsal I felt as if I’d evaporated as Laura.
The morning after the dress rehearsal Helen and I took a walk on the beach. She tucked her arm in mine and we strolled across the dunes. We didn’t speak; she seemed deep in thought. Then she murmured, “Don’t be afraid to stand up to me as Laura in our scenes. Laura is timid and reclusive and she lives in a dream world with those glass animals, but she is also very stubborn. She won’t ever give in; she is never going out in that terrible outside world again. Remember, she vomited when she went into the city that one time. Think about it. She stands her ground with her mother, don’t you agree?”
I told Helen I did. Of course what she said had special resonance for me. I realized that every time I stood up to Helen as Amanda, it would be as if I were confronting my own mother. From then on, I did, and it worked.
The situation was that familiar. Amanda did remind me of Mama: edgy, wayward, domineering. Our battles ran on her energy as she insisted I stay with my peers. I should think about my future and security and finding a decent, responsible man. “You won’t be young and beautiful forever, you know!” I never felt I was a match for her, but I kept on rebelling. Just recently she had been scathing after discovering that my latest companion was a jazz composer who’d been arrested for drug possession. I thought he was so sensitive and talented. I’d contributed to his bail. We’d argued about whether he was worth it until we were exhausted, and then, her voice cracking with emotion, she cried out, “You will hate me for saying you are a fool, but you are. You are careless and impulsive. You don’t think about the consequences. Someday you’ll regret that you didn’t listen to me. You will miss me terribly . . . and you will realize how much I loved you.”
I used these admonitions that my mother had been repeating to me over and over again since I was a teenager. They were imprinted on my brain and I absorbed them into my performance as Laura.
OPENING NIGHT HELEN and I both received bunches of yellow roses. I didn’t look at the cards. I was too nervous—and I also couldn’t read the telegram my parents had sent. I was overcome with stage fright, which took the form of dizziness, nausea, and heart palpitations. I prayed I would forget the terror by practicing my limp back and forth across my dressing room, but I remained petrified, so I tried Helen’s remedy—wiggling my toes. That worked. Then I glanced at my face in the mirror; my gaze vibrated with intense confused feelings. Would I be able to inhabit Laura as I dreamed I could? I had no idea. I did know I had to overcome my fear. I began to shake; my mouth grew dry. I sipped some water and continued to wiggle my toes.
Miraculously, by the time the stage manager called “Places!” I’d pulled myself together and was able to walk straight and tall across the stage to cross over to my place on the set. In front of me was the Wingfields’ shabby living room, which also served as Laura’s sleeping room, and just beyond, separated by transparent curtains, the dining room. There an old-fashioned whatnot displayed the dozens of gleaming transparent glass animals Laura is so obsessed with.
Dusky lights washed over me as I sat down at the dining room table opposite Helen (who was already there, staring straight ahead). The golden light warmed my shoulders; I felt stronger. (Williams had written, “The light upon Laura should be distinct from the others, having a peculiar pristine clarity such as light used in religious portraits of female saints or madonnas.”)
I heard the audience murmuring and coughing as the curtain rose and Will sauntered onto the fire escape, lit a cigarette, and announced, “Yes, I have tricks in my pocket; I have things up my sleeve . . . But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant guise of illusion.”
Listening to that beautiful evocative language calmed me. I was no longer afraid, but I prayed I would inhabit the painfully shy, crippled Laura in a genuine way. Laura is frozen both by her mother’s unrealistic expectations of her and by her own repressed sexual fantasies.
Will finished his monologue and pulled back the gauzy curtains to reveal Helen and me sitting at the dining room table. The audience went wild, and Helen would soon give them what they expected—flustered charm as a form of acting.
I hadn’t expected this; she was doing a new variation on Amanda. I realized she could overwhelm me if I let her. I didn’t. I held my ground. During our scenes we had actual staring contests. She often would not look back at me, but I never looked away. I resp
onded to Helen as never before; I related to her as Amanda/Mama, finally connecting totally to this aging star.
The audience was adoring her; she had an awesome emotional hold on them. There was something endearing about her. She once told me, “I think I’m a plain Jane. If I’m popular, it’s because people think I remind them of someone in their family.” Maybe so. I’ll never forget that fierce little face topped by a god-awful stringy wig. She would soon enter my dreams, her voice grating in my ear: “RISE AND SHINE! RISE AND SHINE!”
I had no idea how I did that night. I performed in a kind of trance, lights hot on my face. I felt utterly drained as the curtain came down and applause swelled. Helen received a standing ovation, the rest of us enthusiastic applause. Will hugged me tight in the wings. He was sweating profusely and breathing hard.
“I don’t know whether I was any good or not,” I whispered.
“Neither do I—we can’t judge our performances. But I gave it my all,” he whispered back hoarsely. “It’s all you can do.” He would give it his all every night after that and then go off and get roaring drunk.
I hurried to my dressing room to prepare for the opening night party. I was just zipping into the brocade satin cocktail dress I’d borrowed from Mama when there was a knock on my door and Tennessee Williams appeared, with arms outstretched.
“Baby, you look like my Laura and behave like my Laura,” he crooned, and then he broke into a wild cackle and embraced me.
The Men in My Life Page 18
