Fifties (42 page)

A Streetcar Named Desire
was not just a play—it was an event. Its frank treatment of sophisticated sexual themes marked it as part of a powerful new current in American society and cultural life. Even the plot seemed emblematic—the brutal assault on Blanche’s prim, Victorian pretensions by Stanley’s primal sexuality. Every night on Broadway the audience would leave the theater visibly shaken—not only in response to Blanche’s tragic breakdown, but also in some small way, perhaps, because they had gotten a glimpse of the violent changes just beginning to transform their own culture and lives.

That
Streetcar,
first on Broadway and then on film, seemed to transcend a mere theatrical triumph to become a cultural benchmark was due to three remarkable talents, all then at that zenith of their powers: Tennessee Williams, perhaps the greatest American playwright; Marlon Brando, the most original American actor of his time; and finally Elia Kazan, the great director. The cumulative force of these three men caused an explosion that shattered the pleasant conventions of American life. Different though they were in many ways, all three were outsiders, liberated by the changing times and eager to assault existing conventions.

Williams was gay, his private life an open secret. Kazan was a Greek-American, driven by the feverish energy of the outsider looking in. Brando was a self-invented outsider, a middle-class American who scorned the conventions of middle-class life.
Streetcar
derived its vitality from the talents of all three, and the person who realized that from the start was Williams. After a long, arduous apprenticeship as a playwright, he achieved a major success with
The Glass Menagerie.
For
Streetcar
he passionately pursued Kazan, although at that point hardly the best known or preeminent director on Broadway. Still, Williams was certain he could put over the poetic vision of his play. Williams recognized his own limitations, and in a letter to Kazan he wrote: “... The cloudy dream type, which I admit to being, needs the complementary eye of the more objective and dynamic worker. I believe you are also a dreamer. There are dreamy touches in your direction which are vastly provocative, but you have the dynamism my works need.”

With
Streetcar,
Williams made the unsayable sayable, the forbidden legitimate. The playwright seemed to have a natural instinct for violating convention: On the eve of the New Haven opening of
Streetcar
he went to the home of Thornton Wilder, then a formidable if rather conservative figure in the American theater. There, Williams remembered, Wilder explained (as if holding “a papal audience”) that the play was “based on a fatally mistaken premise. No female who has ever been such a lady [he was referring to Stella] could possibly marry a vulgarian such as Stanley.” Listening to this dismissal of his work, Williams thought to himself of Wilder, “This character has never had a good lay.”

Tennessee Williams was born in Mississippi. His mother, Edwina Dakin, was the daughter of an Episcopalian minister. She was reared, at least in her own mind, to be a great Southern lady, without, regrettably, the financial means the role necessitated.

In the small towns where her father held the ministry, Edwina was regarded as something of a catch; even though she had no money, she had a good family, looks, and grace. She filled her diaries with innocent, vain reports of the young men who courted her, to whom she referred as gentlemen callers, a term Williams was later to appropriate for
The Glass Menagerie.
One day Cornelius Coffin Williams showed up. As people with pretensions are often fooled by their own kind, Edwina was taken immediately by his charm, probably in no small part because she sensed he was a rogue, a drinker, a gambler, and a carouser on those occasions when he was away from her. She wrote in her diary on June 1, 1907: “Many men have said I love you, but only three have said Will you marry me. I will marry one next Monday. Finis. Goodbye.”

The marriage was a disaster from the start. C. C. Williams did not intend that marriage would change his life. His job as a traveling salesman gave him the freedom of the road, the freedom not to be home, and he seized on it. Inevitably, husband and wife fought, and when Edwina gave birth, she moved from their first apartment, in
southern Mississippi, back to Columbus to be with her parents. Their first child, Rose, was born there. Divorce was unthinkable—so this was a solution of sorts. C. C. spent most of his time on the road, and Edwina became once again the rector’s daughter. As her father moved, so did her family, which would soon include a son, Thomas Lanier Williams, born in March 1911, in the church vestry.

When C. C. made his periodic visits home, he treated his family with contempt. His son came to despise the kind of blustery macho his father exhibited: Years later, talking about the kind of men who made antigay remarks in locker rooms, Williams said, “They’re all the same, shoe salesmen with bad territories and wives they can’t abide. So they take it out on us.”

For the first seven years of Tennessee Williams’s life, his parents’ marriage survived. Then C. C. was made sales manager of an International Shoe branch in St. Louis. It was a crushing moment for everyone: C. C. had lost his freedom, and Edwina had gained an unwanted husband. From then on, young Tennessee’s life was a horror. The family moved constantly as Edwina sought better neighborhoods in a hopeless attempt to regain the one thing that mattered to her—social status. Her husband drank and gambled away his salary. Edwina began to drift into the fantasy world of her girlhood, twenty years earlier. She romanticized a world of privilege and genteel manners. External appearances became desperately important. She smothered her children with love, finding unsuitable almost every potential playmate for them. The other boys were too rough, the girls too common. Self-knowledge was not her strong suit. When
The Glass Menagerie
opened in Chicago, with its portrait of the mother who lived in a fantasy world of her own making, Edwina attended the opening night party. Laurette Taylor, who played the character based on Mrs. Williams, asked her, “Well, how did you like you’seff, Miz’ Williams?” “Myself?” answered the shocked Edwina Williams.

Young Thomas Lanier Williams (aka Tennessee Williams) struggled terribly with the secret knowledge that he was sexually different. “Miss Nancy,” C. C. sometimes called him, with cruel contempt. As a boy he could not conquer an uncontrollable blush whenever someone looked him directly in the eye. “Somewhere deep in my nerves there was imprisoned a young girl, a sort of blushing school maiden,” he wrote. The Great Crash of 1929 had almost prevented him from going off to college, but with a thousand dollars borrowed from his grandparents he enrolled at the University of Missouri in Columbia, a place he quickly came to loathe. There he
saw himself as a social failure: “I was not a young man who would turn many heads on the street.... The pupil of my left eye had turned grey with that remarkably early cataract. And I was still very shy except when drunk. Oh, I was quite the opposite when I had a couple of drinks under the belt,” he later wrote. He put in three years at Missouri before his father brought him back to St. Louis and got him a job at International Shoe for sixty-five dollars a month as an accountant.

Back in St. Louis, he would have to face the terrible experience of watching his sister, Rose, mentally come apart. The problems of the family fell heaviest on her. Tennessee and his sister had always been close. Deprived of other playmates, they had taken to each other; he had loved her gentleness and the vivid quality of her imagination. She had always known that her mother’s plans for her were hopeless—she would never be a popular Southern belle pursued by the handsome young men from Vanderbilt and Sewanee. As a young woman she had gone to Knoxville to stay with two of her aunts and to make her debut; it was a dismal failure. When she returned to Memphis, Tennessee asked her how it had gone. “Aunt Ella and Aunt Belle only like charming people,” she had told him, “and I’m not charming.”

Slowly, the seriousness of her mental illness became obvious. The more fragile and alienated she became, the more Edwina Williams pushed for her to be the belle she could never be. “If I could only get Rose into her right senses,” Edwina wrote her own mother. By the mid-thirties Rose was a distant, elusive creature, moving steadily toward true madness. She decided that she would eat only Campbell’s tomato soup, and saved the labels from them. She became dangerous to herself and to others. Once, her mother happened to see that she was going off to a doctor’s appointment with a carving knife, quite possibly to murder him. Rose knew what was happening to her. At one point her brother made light of mental illness, and she chided him. “It’s worse than death.” By 1937 she had become a violent schizophrenic and a frontal lobotomy was done on her.

What saved Tennessee was his writing. When he was still a young boy, Edwina had given him a typewriter: “It immediately became my place of retreat, my cave, my refuge,” he wrote. Here he could escape, create his own reality. It also gave him a hope that he might get out of that home and out of St. Louis. His family life had been rich in material for someone who managed to escape it. In his ability to look back, examine that life, and write about it, Williams showed a rare emotional strength.

Elia Kazan always believed that he and Williams both survived because of their ability to work. “He did it every morning and nothing was allowed to interfere,” Kazan wrote of his friend. “He would get up, silent and remote from whoever happened to be with him, dress in a bathrobe, mix himself a double dry martini, put a cigarette in his long white holder, sit before his typewriter, grind in a blank sheet of paper, and so become Tennessee Williams. Up until then he’d been nothing but ‘an aging faggot’ (his phrase to me) alone in a world he had always believed and still believed hostile.”

Success came slowly. During his twenties and thirties, he waited on tables and worked as an elevator operator and as an usher (he got the job because the previous usher’s uniform fit him). For a time he was a chicken plucker in Los Angeles—for every one he plucked, he put a feather in a bottle, which would show at the end of the day how much he was owed. But he was always writing. Slowly, there were small signs of success. Then in March 1939 his breakthrough came. He entered a playwriting contest sponsored by the Group Theater in New York. All writers were supposed to be under twenty-five, but he altered his birthday by three years in order to enter. One of the committee members, Molly Day Thacher Kazan, wife of a young actor-director named Elia Kazan, was so impressed by Williams’s work she lobbied for a special award of a hundred dollars for him. She also suggested that Audrey Wood, a young New York agent, represent him. “There’s a wonderful young playwright riding around Southern California on a bicycle,” Molly told her husband. Soon there was a one-thousand-dollar grant from the Rockefeller Foundation (“my friends the Rockefellers,” he liked to say afterward). But even then things were hard. An early play,
Battle of Angels,
was produced in Boston, but the themes were too explicit for the time. The play provoked a negative response among critics and theatergoers, and the local censor was anxious to sanitize it. Scared of the controversy, the producers paid Williams a hundred dollars for the right to close it.

He was rootless. He lived in New Orleans, New York, Los Angeles, Provincetown, Key West—almost anywhere he could but St. Louis. Like Faulkner’s, his best work is rooted in the South, and his characters often seem to represent certain Southern archetypes. But he had no desire to live again among his roots. Sometimes he rented a small place of his own, sometimes he stayed with friends. His personal habits were eccentric. Yet he never lost sight of the need to write. “He put writing before knowing where he was going to sleep or where his next meal was coming from,” his friend Donald Windham
noted. In the midst of the worst kind of personal chaos, he always remained wildly productive.

Audrey Wood got him a job as a screenwriter for MGM at $250. Two hundred and fifty a month? he asked, thinking it a princely sum. “Two hundred and fifty a week,” she answered. That brief time in Hollywood was, he later reflected, one of the happiest in his life, even though he and the studio had nothing in common. He spent most of the time doing his own work and enjoying the West Coast and feeling wealthy. He finished the play that became
The Glass Menagerie
during that period. Laurette Taylor, a great actress who had been an alcoholic for more than a decade, was cast in it; she seemed unable to memorize her lines and unable to stop drinking. As opening night approached, disaster loomed. Then miraculously, just on opening night, it all came together and she gave an inspired performance. The audience nonetheless was uneasy, for this play was different. But two local critics relentlessly championed it, and it stayed alive and became a hit. It had even greater success when it moved to New York. Finally the door had begun to open for him.

He was lucky to find as his first producer Irene Selznick, who was at that time attempting to establish herself as a Broadway producer. The daughter of the fabled and feared Louis B. Mayer, she was in the midst of a long and arduous divorce from Hollywood producer David Selznick. In New York she courted a number of agents who represented younger writers, among them Audrey Wood. Wood said to her, “My most cherished and important client has a play I would like to put in your hands. It is his best play yet. His name is Tennessee Williams.” Ms. Selznick was excited but puzzled. After all, she was a mere novice. “Why me? Why me?” she asked Ms. Wood. “Find me someone else,” she answered the agent. For it had remained hard going for Williams. His work was not commercial, and his themes were difficult; he was said to be difficult to deal with personally as well. Ms. Selznick read and loved the play but was immediately concerned that she was not experienced enough to handle it. She met with Williams, and their only conversation seemed to be about the title. Did she like the original title,
Poker Night,
or the backup,
A Streetcar Named Desire
? But they did agree that she would produce it.