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) (25 page)

Hoping for greater box office, Mankiewicz wanted Gore to rewrite the ending to make it more gruesome and dramatic. “I will not depict the ghastly death of Sebastian, devoured by the flesh-eaters, but I want the plot to call for him to be chased, bludgeoned, and stripped by a group of angry young boys who are intent on eating pieces of his flesh,” Mankiewicz said.

When Tennessee saw the final cut, he said, “That scene is the ultimate parody of a blow-job.”

“In spite of all my efforts,” Gore said, “Monty walked through the picture, giving a strangulated and neurasthenic performance. He spent a great deal of time on screen repeating the words of others, reformulating them in the form of a question.”

Gore knew that Hepburn’s character of Violet Venable was based on Edwina Williams, Tennessee’s mother, who had encouraged doctors to perform a lobotomy on his sexually frustrated sister, Rose Isabel Williams.

Most of
Suddenly’s
interior scenes were filmed at Shepperton Studios in Surrey, England, although the dreadful cannibalistic scene in the fictional “Cabeza de Lobo” was shot on the Balearic island of Majorca off the Mediterranean coast of Spain.

Several biographies have suggested that until she made
Suddenly Last Summer
, Hepburn was not aware of what homosexual men did in bed together and that Gore had to explain it to her. That, of course, is a laughable assertion about a woman who had spent decades in Hollywood among homosexuals. As a lesbian herself, she was deeply involved in a platonic relationship with another closeted homosexual actor, Spencer Tracy. Her best friend was George Cukor, the gay director, and her best female friend and lover was Laura Harding, the American Express heiress.

On the set one sultry afternoon, when London was experiencing a rare heat wave, a jittery Hepburn confronted Gore and Elizabeth, who were sitting in directors’ chairs, discussing the next scene.

“Mr. Vidal, I talked it over with Spence last night, and he and I decided I can’t go on with this film. Your script is just too vile. Give the role to that poor, wretched Mildred Dunnock. She’ll play any part, no matter how demented. With all its flesh-eaters, lesbian nurses, sadistic nuns, it’s all so
Grand Guignol
,” Hepburn said. “No movie-goer will sit through this muck. The characters you and Mr. Williams have created are perverted. I do not understand perversion—never have, never will. I’m far too mentally healthy to be appearing in such demented trash.”

“Miss Hepburn,” Gore said with
gravitas
. “You understand perversion to your toenails. You’ll give one of the most electrifying performances of your life. Forget Dunnock. Do you want us to give the role to Bette Davis? You’ll probably get nominated for an Oscar.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” Hepburn said before walking away.

She went ahead and finished the film as Gore had written it. In fact, she worked even harder to improve the demented and perverted quality of Violet Venable’s character.

That same day, a reporter encountered Elizabeth and asked her what she thought about appearing in such a controversial film. “I’ve always wanted to appear on screen with Venus’s-flytraps,” she said. That was a reference to the re-creation of a carnivorous garden as a set within the movie.

As a kind of gag, her husband, Eddie Fisher, appeared uncredited as a street urchin begging Elizabeth for food. Frank Merlo, the lover of Tennessee Williams, also made an uncredited appearance, as did Gore. Gore and Merlo can be seen among the audience in a wraparound balcony observing Monty in his role as a surgeon performing an operation in a “surgical theater” below.

Mercedes McCambridge, cast as Elizabeth’s greedy mother, recalled what an unhappy time filming
Suddenly
was for everybody: “Monty was coming apart right on the set, but Elizabeth could not provide her usual help because of her own misery. I read constantly in the papers about how much she loved Eddie Fisher. London was an inferno that summer. She and I walked off the sound stage to get some fresh air. Outside, she was in tears. ‘My life is a shambles,’ she admitted. ‘I made a horrible mistake. I married Eddie and I don’t love him. At times, I can’t even stand him.’ I could not believe my ears. Once we went inside, Eddie was there. She made a spectacle of showing her affection for him.”

“Whereas working with Joan Crawford is a nightmare, working with Elizabeth Taylor is merely a disturbing experience,” McCambridge said. “On the set she sounded like a fishwife, calling people ‘assholes’ or ‘schmuck.’ I thought she was completely outrageous. She was tender to Monty, but by the end of the shoot, she wasn’t speaking to Hepburn. Elizabeth told me that Hepburn came on to her in her dressing room one afternoon—and she was rejected. That’s why Hepburn was so bitter. A lot of those old dragon stars of the 1930s were dykes—not just Hepburn, but Garbo and Dietrich, too. Might I have the honor of adding Joan Crawford to that list—I should know!”

Tennessee arrived on the set and spent time with Elizabeth. He told her, “I was with Monty last night. He’s washing down his codeine pills with brandy. But who am I to cast stones? He told me that after the accident, he has become impotent and the only way he can achieve sexual satisfaction is to peform fellatio on a man or else be penetrated by one.”

“Thank you, Tennessee, you’re a darling, but I really don’t know what I can do with this personal data about Monty,” Elizabeth said.

When Truman Capote saw the movie, he claimed that Elizabeth’s final dramatic monologue was “the best scene she’d ever performed before or likely ever again. She should win the Oscar.”

Mankiewicz defined her long, concluding monologue as “an aria from a tragic opera of madness and death.”

After she shot that scene, Elizabeth became hysterical and couldn’t stop crying for hours.

***

Throughout the filming, Hepburn had been consistently furious with Mankiewicz for his brutal treatment of the tormented Monty. She was also furious for his treatment of herself as well, interpreting his behavior as condescending.

On the last day of Hepburn’s appearance before the camera, the tension between Mankiewicz and Hepburn was obvious to the entire crew. By ten o’clock, she and the director were screaming at each other. But once the camera was turned on her, the star became her carefully controlled, professional self, giving an awesome interpretation of her particular manifestation of evil.

By five o’clock that afternoon, Mankiewicz defined the experience as a wrap. Then Hepburn walked over to him. “Are you absolutely sure that that is all you’ll need from me on this film?”

“I am absolutely sure,” he told her. “You’re free to go.”

“Fine, she said. Then in front of everybody, including Elizabeth, she spat in his face, turned her back to him, and stormed off the set.

Wiping the spit off his face, Mankiewicz, in front of Elizabeth said, “Miss Hepburn is the most experienced amateur actress in the world. Her performances, though remarkably effective, are fake.”

In contrast, Truman Capote found that “Hepburn is the Queen of High Camp as she stands in that fantasy New Orleans garden filled with insectivorous growths. Monty looks as if he is going to expire at any minute. Although I detest the film’s scriptwriter, Gore Vidal, I have to admit
Suddenly Last Summer
marks the end of the 1950s. The public is obviously eager for a more candid expression of sex.”

The National Legion of Decency, affiliated with the Catholic Church, relaxed its draconian Production Code rules for
Suddenly
. “Since the film illustrates the horrors of the homosexual lifestyle, it can be considered moral in theme even though it deals with sexual perversions,” the organization announced.

In spite of their difficulties during the shoot, Mankiewicz later said, “Her role as Cathy was the best performance Elizabeth ever gave on the screen.”

Time
claimed that watching
Suddenly
was like being crushed in the “clammy coils of a giant snake.” The critic for
Variety
made the claim that, “It’s the most bizarre film ever made by a major studio.”

Inadvertently, film critic Bosley Crowther increased attendance in droves when he wrote that the movie was about “the world of degenerates obsessed with rape, incest, homosexuality, and cannibalism.” By “degenerates,” he was referring, of course, to Gore and Tennessee.

“We could not have asked for better advertising,” Gore said, in response.

“It stretched my credulity to believe such a ‘hip’ doll as our Liz wouldn’t know at once in the film that she was ‘being used for something evil,’” Tennessee said.

In contrast to Tennessee’s objections to Elizabeth and her performance, he referred to Hepburn as “a playwright’s dream. She makes my dialogue sound better than it is. She invests every scene with the intuition of an artist born to act.”

The New York Times
shrieked that
Suddenly Last Summer
“was a celebration of sodomy, incest, cannibalism, and Elizabeth Taylor at her most voluptuous.”

Ultimately, she came to prefer
Suddenly
as her favorite film—“emotionally draining, but also emotionally stimulating.”

In spite of the critics, and in spite of the doom-predicting Hedda Hopper,
Suddenly
became the fourth highest grossing movie of 1960, earning nearly $6 million in domestic ticket sales alone.

Far from emerging as a flop, as some in Hollywood had predicted,
Suddenly
kept Elizabeth in the ranks of Hollywood’s Top Ten box office stars, a list that was dominated at the time by Rock Hudson and Doris Day in the wake of their highly successful
Pillow Talk
(1959).

Elizabeth told her secretary, Dick Hanley, “I think I will win this time, if for no other reason than the Academy overlooked my performance as
Maggie the Cat
. It’s time they made up for that oversight.”

“Don’t get your hopes up,” Hanley warned her. “Hepburn is running against you. That old dyke wouldn’t listen to reason and run as Best Supporting Actress. That way, you both might take home Oscars.”

At the presentation of the Oscars, Elizabeth once again had her hopes crushed. She and Hepburn cancelled each other out in the Best Actress category, the award going to Simone Signoret for her star part in
Room at the Top
.

Privately, Gore told friends, “Actually, Hepburn should have won. Inspite of her objections, it was perhaps her greatest movie role. She even made me forget my original dream casting of Bette Davis.”

But later, even Gore criticized the movie. “It was not helped by those over-weight ushers from the Roxy Theater on Fire Island pretending to be small, ravenous boys.”

Finally, as the years went by, Mankiewicz himself attacked the play, appraising
Suddenly Last Summer
as “badly constructed, based on the most elementary Freudian psychology.”

Truman Capote first met Montgomery Clift in the early 1950s in Manhattan when he was living in a $40-a-month walk-up at 209 East 61
^st
Street.

“I had seen him emote with Elizabeth Taylor in
A Place in the Sun
, and I thought he looked absolutely divine,” Truman said.

“The elegant man I saw on the screen was not the actor I encountered in the flesh,” Truman recalled. “At the time, Monty was living with this Italian named Dino, an unemployed airline pilot who was an absolute moron. Monty had been reared within a cultured background. Perhaps as a rebellion against that uptight environment, he was chasing after trashy men. He told me, ‘If the dick is big enough, the class doesn’t matter.’”

Since the earliest stages of his life and career, Truman had been intrigued by this kind of intimate inside gossip. “It’s the Southern storyteller in me,” he always said, if caught up in the delivery of a non-factual account.