Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) (100 page)

While working on revisions, Tennessee left New York for Tulane University in New Orleans, where Maureen Stapleton, one of his favorite actresses, was starring in his one-act play,
27 Wagons Full of Cotton
. She played Flora, a somewhat stupid farm wife whose husband, Jake, destroys a neighbor’s cotton gin.

In the year that followed, the play would be adapted into the film,
Baby Doll
.

Before the end of February, Tennessee found himself back in New York to approve the casting of the play. Several major stars wanted the role of Brick, but ultimately, it went to Ben Gazzara, with Barbara Bel Geddes cast as his wife, Maggie the Cat. In the past, many producers, including Howard Hughes at RKO, didn’t think Bel Geddes was sexy enough.

Gazzara asked Tennessee where he got the title for his play.

“It came from my father, Cornelius,” Tennessee said. “He used to tell my mother, Edwina, ‘You’re making me as nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof.’”

Tennessee became quite fond of the New York-born Gazzara, whom he found had a rugged sex appeal. Like Frank Merlo, he was of Sicilian origin. “I have a thing for Sicilian men,” Tennessee confided to Kazan.

The actor told Tennessee that his drifting into acting rescued him from a life of street crime.

Rough, virile, and unconventionally handsome, Gazzara later admitted, “I was a babe magnet, also attracting a lot of interest among the gays.”

At around the time Tennessee met Gazzara, he was engaged in affairs with both Eva Gabor and Marlene Dietrich. Audrey Hepburn would later fall in love with him.

At his favorite Manhattan hangout, Harold’s Show Spot, Gazzara told Tennessee, “Eva sure likes my Italian salami.”

Tennessee responded, “And who among us can resist it?”

Gazzara confided to Tennessee, “At the Actors Studio, Marlon Brando and James Dean both chased after me.”

Tennessee was skeptical of all this name dropping. Drunk at the time, he challenged the actor. “I must see this mighty weapon of yours.”

“Okay,” Gazzara said. “Drop by my dressing room one night. I’ll flash for you, but won’t promise to do anything else, since I’m a man for the ladies.”

Tennessee sighed. “So many actors have falsely used that line on me.”

Tennessee approved of Gazzara, “an actor with sexy legs,” for his portrayals of Brick, but he felt that Bel Geddes “was not much of a cat, not complex enough. She’s also too wholesome for my text. A Broadway whore would have been better in the part. Someone more obviously neurotic.”

At a rehearsal, Tennessee protested to Kazan, “Bel Geddes is fuckin’ with my cadence.”

The actress overheard his assessment, and ran from the stage in tears.

During rehearsals for
Cat
, Kazan began to lose his patience with Tennessee. One afternoon, the playwright wandered in drunk from lunch, and plopped down in the middle of the orchestra seats. He didn’t like Bel Geddes in the part, and he let it be known. He called out to her, “More melody in your voice, Barbara. Southern girls have melody in their…”

At that point, Kazan cut him off. He wanted his choice of actress to know that he’d protect her from onslaughts from Tennessee. Kazan walked over and slipped into a seat beside Tennessee, warning him that with another outburst like that, he’d walk off the play. Properly chastised, Tennessee quietly left the theater.

Tennessee also objected to the casting of Burl Ives as Big Daddy. “But he’s a singer,” Tennessee protested.

“Ives stays in the play,” Kazan shot back. “Right away, I had to let Tennessee know I was the guy with the big balls.”

“Ives was perfect for Big Daddy,” Kazan said. “I’d seen him drunk one night, macho and rampant, aroused to the point where he was looking for a fight, anywhere and with anybody. He was Big Daddy to his toenails. But also, the Lion Roaring in Winter.”

Tennessee heartily approved of the rest of the supporting cast—Mildred Dunnock as Big Mama, Pat Hingle as Brother Man, and Madeleine Sherwood as Sister Woman.

When they premiered in Philadelphia, Tennessee invited Gazzara to dine. His fellow guests included Carson McCullers, John Steinbeck, and William Faulkner.

Faulkner was in love with Jean Stein, a member of
Cat’s
production staff. “I felt a terrible torment in the man,” Tennessee wrote in his memoirs: “He always kept his eyes down. Finally, he lifted his eyes once in response to a direct question from me, and the look in his eyes was so terrible, so sad, that I began to cry.”

Even before the play opened on Broadway, rumors surged through Hollywood that
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
would eventually reach the screen. Even before any movie star saw the play, many actresses wanted to get their claws in the role of Maggie. Interested parties included Marilyn Monroe.

On opening night, March 24, 1955, Marilyn showed up with Lee Strasberg of the Actors Studio.

After the curtain went down that night to the sound of wild applause and standing ovations, Marilyn arrived backstage, where Gazzara saw her talking to Tennessee for at least fifteen minutes.

Finally, she walked over to congratulate Gazzara. Wearing dangerously elevated high heels, she said to him, “I hear you may play Brick in the movie opposite me,” using the purring voice of a cat.

Gazzara wondered if Tennessee had promised her the film role.

Before giving Gazzara a wet-lipped kiss, she slipped him her phone number, informing him that she had to go to a party. “Call me and then drop by my suite after ten o’clock. I’m busy until then. Let’s see what our off-screen chemistry is like.” Then, she seemed to appraise his body. “From the looks of things, I expect an explosion. Tennessee and I like Italian men.”

[Ironically, during rehearsals, Tennessee had come backstage to instruct Gazzara, “Distance yourself from Maggie,” he said. “Whether the audience knows it or not, you are playing a homosexual.”]

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
ran for 20 months and earned Tennessee a Pulitzer Prize.

A 1974 revival by the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford (Connecticut) featured Elizabeth Ashley as Maggie the Cat, with Keir Dullea playing Brick. Tennessee restored much of the text which had been removed, under instructions from Elia Kazan, from the original.

On Broadway a revival in 1990 starred Kathleen Turner, who was eventually nominated for a Tony Award based on her performance as Maggie.

In 2003, another revival starring Ashley Judd received only lukewarm reviews.

In 2008, an African-American production opened on Broadway.

The latest revival was in 2013, with Scarlett Johansson playing Maggie the Cat.

Tennessee was in Barcelona in July of 1955 when Audrey Wood notified him of the half-million dollar movie sale of
Cat
. He wrote Frank Merlo, “That means we don’t have to worry about the hard stuff for another ten years, I guess. We’ll be old girls by then, and can get our social security when it runs out, and by such little economies as saving old teabags and turning collars and cuffs, we can eke out a comfortable elderly existence in some quaint little cold-water walk-up in the West Nineties in New York.”

Paul Newman’s appearance as Brick on the screen opposite Elizabeth Taylor in the 1958 release of
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
was preceded by a bizarre sequence of casting sagas which included not only Tennessee, but Grace Kelly, Vivien Leigh, and Elvis Presley.

The dramas began in 1954 when Tennessee was still working on the Broadway play. Three days before opening night at the Morosco Theater, he was still working on it. Months before its premiere, there had been much speculation in the press about
Cat. The Los Angeles Times
, in an embarrassing piece of misinformation, labeled it as a comedy.

Newman’s involvement in the play began with a phone message that came in to a publicist at Warner Brothers. The message was from “G.K.” The publicity department was savvy enough to know it originated with Grace Kelly. When word of this got back to Tennessee, and when he called her back, she arranged a meeting with him.

If casting had gone differently, Paul Newman would have played the role of Brick on Broadway alongside Grace Kelly. But the deal fell through because of events which eventually concluded, in April of 1956, with Kelly’s widely publicized marriage to Prince Rainier of Monaco.

During his early years in Hollywood, Newman had had a brief fling with Kelly at the fabled Château Marmont, after having met her previously at a party in her Manhattan apartment. Both of the nascent stars had quickly moved on to other conquests.

Now, in anticipation of a role in Tennessee’s play, after some phone dialogues with Kelly, Newman agreed to meet her at a secluded restaurant in San Fernando Valley, where he was ushered into a back room where Kelly was waiting for him with a strange man in shadows. To his surprise, Newman quickly realized that the man was Tennessee.

[Director Elia Kazan and Tennessee had first seen Newman perform in the 1953 Broadway production of William Inge’s Picnic. Ralph Meeker had played the lead, and director Joshua Logan had cast Newman as the rich boy, Alan, who loses his girl (Janice Rule) to the seductive drifter.]

After that performance, both the director and the playwright had congratulated Newman.

“You were just beautiful,” Tennessee exclaimed, embracing Newman. “But spectacularly beautiful. Up to now, I thought Marlon was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen on stage. Now you come along, making my fickle heart waver. With you on the stage with Ralph Meeker, all homosexuals will have a difficult choice. Do they want to see sexual menace or do they want to worship at the altar of male beauty?”

Newman was embarrassed by Tennessee’s adulation, but he returned the compliment. “It’s an honor to get a seal of approval from America’s greatest playwright.”

“With a compliment like that,” Tennessee said, “all you have to do is blow in my ear and I’ll follow you anywhere. One of these days, I’m going to write a role for you, one so great you’ll always be remembered for it.”

“A promise I’ll hold you to, Mr. Williams,” Newman responded.

Encountering Tennessee again after so much time made Newman think that perhaps that promise, hastily concluded backstage at
Picnic
, might soon be fulfilled.

Kelly rose from the table with the grace of a swan to kiss Newman on the mouth. Tennessee also stood up for him, kissing him on both cheeks, and recalling their previous meeting on Broadway.