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) (28 page)

In the summer of 1944, he’d met a Harvard Law student, William Cannastra, on the beach at Provincetown. When classes began at Harvard, Cannastra illegally slipped Tennessee into his dormitory, finding a closet-like room for the young playwright, where they could have sex without attracting undue attention.

“He was one wild boy,” Tennessee recalled, “but with a lot of male flash and charm if you could see beyond his eccentricities.”

Most evenings, Cannastra made a meticulous, somewhat obsessive tour of the Harvard campus. A peeping Tom, he had carefully plotted X-locations on a map, marking spots where he was likely to see window shades left up, providing a peep show for him.

He was especially fond of watching young men seduce coeds. If the men attracted him sufficiently, Cannastra would later approach them and offer to perform fellatio on them.

Right before December, when Tennessee had relocated to Manhattan, Cannastra visited him over the holidays. The trip ended violently and tragically.

The Harvard student was drinking heavily. One drunken night, he boarded a subway in the Times Square area. He was leaning out the window to wave goodbye to a sailor he’d only recently seduced. The train rushed forward, and the student’s head collided with a steel column, decapitating him.

“It was a ghastly end to a summer romance,” Tennessee later said.

Tennessee’s agent, Audrey Wood, had secured investors and a producer for
The Glass Menagerie
, which was to go into rehearsals in Chicago. Margo Jones had already signed on as associate director.

The new producer, Eddie Dowling, was an actor, screenwriter, playwright, director, songwriter, and composer. When he met Tennessee, he told him, “I am a Renaissance man.”

“Perhaps his background prepared him to become a producer,” Tennessee said rather facetiously. “He was number 14 in a family of 17 children. He dropped out of school when he was eight years old to become a cabin boy on a Mississippi showboat. Later, he became a music hall singer in Brooklyn. At one time, he owned a small sausage factory in Los Angeles.”

He also confided a deep dark secret to Tennessee. His name wasn’t Eddie, but “Narcissus.”

Wood had been impressed with Dowling as producer of plays by such authors as Philip Barry and a young William Saroyan.

Together, Margo and Dowling set out to cast
The Glass Menagerie
. It was Margo who suggested the great actress, Laurette Taylor, who was in retirement. Born in 1883 in New York City to Irish parents, she had once been a major star on the American stage and in films. But in 1944, she was a recluse, mired in alcoholism.

When Tennessee first met her in a Chicago hotel room, he discovered that she was drunk. “Not only that, she was a larger-than-life personality, a woman of mercurial moods and great eccentricities, taking refuge from life and its unbearable realities by escaping into romantic daydreams.”

In Hollywood in the 1920s, she’d had a torrid affair with screen heartthrob John Gilbert. Greta Garbo had lured him away. Laurette had distinguished herself in such plays as
Peg O’ My Heart [wherein she emoted as the romantic lead in almost 1300 performances, beginning in 1912, endearing her to millions]
and
Outward Bound
.

“I had great sympathy for her,” Tennessee said. “Far, far, from that lonely hotel, she knew the squalid life, what it was to be cut off from the world and love during her days of purgatory.”

In New York, Dowling had delivered a copy of the script of
The Glass Menagerie
to her apartment. She spent all night reading it, and was in Dowling’s office when it opened the next morning. “At last I’ve found the role of Amanda that I have been waiting for all my life. I can play that nagging, down-at-heel, ex-Southern Belle. I know her to my toenails.”

Wandering the streets of Chicago at night, Tennessee found many lovers enrolled at the University of Chicago. He would pick them up, take then to his hotel room, read Hart Crane to them, and then make love to them for most of the night. “These young men, for the most part, were emotionally petulant, but sexual dynamos,” he later said. “They were also very fickle. If you dared fall in love with one of them, it was like a fox’s teeth biting into your heart.”

Even as preparations for the production of the play were underway, Tennessee, in a hotel room, continued to polish the characters of
Menagerie. [They included the family’s toxic matriarch, Amanda Wingfield, whose husband worked for the telephone company “and fell in love with long distance,” leaving her to raise her two children under harsh financial conditions
.

Her son, Tom Wingfield, is really an autobiographic version of Tennessee himself. He worked at a shoe warehouse, but aspired to be a poet. His sister, Laura, has a limp, owing to a childhood illness. She also had an inferiority complex and was isolated from the outside world, preferring her menagerie of glass figurines, a unicorn being her favorite
.

The Gentleman Caller is Jim O’Connor. A popular athlete during his school days, he works as a shipping clerk at the same shoe warehouse as Tom. Tom invites Jim home for dinner as a possible beau for Laura, not knowing that he already has a girlfriend.]

From the beginning, Dowling made it clear that he wanted to play the role of Tom.

As Laura, he cast Julie Haydon.

Tennessee was unhappy with the choice of Haydon, who had had an undistinguished film career in the 1930s, ending with
A Family Affair
(1937), the movie that launched the Andy Hardy series that made a big star out of Mickey Rooney.

[In 1944, the drama critic, George Jean Nathan, would review both the play and Haydon’s performance in it. In 1955, Haydon married him. Throughout her life, Haydon maintained her link to
The Glass Menagerie,
in spite of Tennessee’s objections. In later revivials, as she aged, she assumed the role of Amanda once in a performance off off-Broadway. She lived to the age of 84, and
The New York Times,
as she had predicted, headlined her demise as “A STAR IN GLASS MENAGERIE DIES”

The casting of Anthony Ross as the Gentleman Caller pleased Tennessee immensely. This was the first and only important role for Ross, who went on to make some undistinguished films at 20
^th
Century Fox and some appearances in television productions before dying in 1955 at the age of 46 of a heart attack.]

Laurette nicknamed Ross and Tennessee as “Big Bum” and “Little Bum,” respectively.

“Every night in Chicago, Tony and I went cruising together for rough trade,” Tennessee admitted. “I scored more than he did because he’d get too drunk to pick anyone up. Finally, I felt sorry for him and began to purchase flesh on the hoof for him to enjoy if he were sober enough.”

“He always pulled himself together the following day at rehearsals. His performance was extraordinary, considering how tormented he was. Or maybe it was that inner turmoil that made him such a good actor.”

“It wasn’t a different man for me every night,” Tennessee said. “Sometimes, I focused on just one man, however brief the affair. I temporarily fell in love with this young Irish actor who was appearing in Chicago in a play called
Winged Victory
. He was remarkably handsome and perhaps more gifted offstage than on. I stayed at the Hotel Sherman, located within the Loop of Chicago. In my single room, this Irishman made the nightingales sing and sing. When I introduced him to Tony, he was very jealous of my catch.”

“Alas, this son of Ireland deserted me for another, but I managed to hook up with another handsome student from the University of Chicago. A tall blonde, he and I used to go swimming in the nude at the Y, where he attracted a lot of envious eyes from the other male bathers. With this blonde, the nightingales continued to sing their hearts out. The student would explode with a crescendo, sleep for thirty minutes, and then the music would start all over again.”

During the day, Tennessee attended rehearsals, noting, to his dismay, that Dowling and Laurette were not compatible. She denounced his lack of talent as an actor and, as a director, she appraised him as inarticulate. “Talking to him is like wading through molasses,” she told Tennessee.

Firing back, he said that Laurette’s Southern accent was acquired “years ago from some long ago black domestic.”

As Laura, Haydon never impressed Tennessee. He called her “bright-eyed attentiveness a symptom of lunacy.”

Tennessee was eventually introduced to the financial backer of the play, a shady Chicago entrepreneur, Louis J. Singer, whose main business involved running seedy hotels catering to prostitutes, drunkards, and drug addicts.

The Glass Menagerie
had its Chicago premiere the day after Christmas in 1944. The initial opening was lackluster. The critic, George Jean Nathan, defined it as “less a play than a palette of sub-Chekhovian pastels brushed up into a charming resemblance of one.”

Laurette Taylor got the best reviews.

In an act of malice, Nathan sent a bottle of liquor backstage to Taylor, knowing that she was on the wagon as an alcoholic struggling to recover. Tennessee never forgave him for this “wanton cruelty.”

During the next two weeks, the play was presented to half-full theaters. But two critics, Claudia Cassidy and Ashton Stevens, championed it, writing about it almost daily. Cassidy called it “a rare evening in the theater.” Ticket sales rose, and even the mayor of Chicago urged his citizens to go and see it.

A ham actor desperate for applause, Dowling seemed to resent all the acclaim going to Laurette and Tennessee. At one point, he told the press, “I rescued the young playwright from the bottom of a rain barrel.” Tennessee, of course, resented Dowling for taking credit for nearly all of his success. He especially objected to Dowling’s claim, “The poor, wilted manuscript arrived on my doorstep, and I struggled to rescue it from a dark oblivion.”