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) (29 page)

Word reached people in show business, who stopped in to see it during their sojourns in Chicago, and Tennessee found himself greeting Katharine Hepburn, who one day would appear on TV as Amanda; Helen Hayes, who would play Amanda in London; Gregory Peck
[“He gave me an erection,” Tennessee claimed]
, and such stellar lights as Maxwell Anderson, playwright Mary Chase, Guthrie McClintic, Ruth Gordon, Raymond Massey, and Luther Adler.

After the run of
The Glass Menagerie
in Chicago, Tennessee packed his lone suitcase and headed for the uncertainties of Broadway, where both the critics and the theater-going public, in his estimation, “had fang-like teeth.”

In Manhattan, on the afternoon before the opening of
The Glass Menagerie
on Broadway, Laurette Taylor seemed to be coming unglued. She kept excusing herself to go to the toilet to vomit. Tennessee himself was in such a nervous state that he later revealed, “I had to have sex every other hour to steady my nerves.”

The play opened in Broadway’s Playhouse Theater on March 31, 1945. “Even my nemesis, critic George Jean Nathan, arrived in town to see it again. I expected a blistering attack.”

Actually, Nathan wrote that “
The Glass Menagerie
provides by long odds the most imaginative evening that the stage has offered in this season.”

Tennessee’s most treasured review came from Arthur Miller, who said: “The play in one stroke lifted lyricism to its highest level in our theater’s history.”

At the end of the play, the audience shouted AUTHOR! AUTHOR! From his fourth row seat, Tennessee rose to take a bow. He bowed to the actors, “thereby presenting a view of my posterior for the world to see.”

Backstage, he congratulated Laurette. The play had opened on the day before Easter Sunday. She told him, “Jesus Christ will rise tomorrow—but I shan’t.”

The Glass Menagerie
was swamped with awards, including the Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. But the Pulitzer Prize eluded Tennessee, that coveted award going to Mary Chase for her comedy,
Harvey
, a blockbusting, long-running play that opened on Broadway in November of 1944 about a kind and gentle man with an invisible friend who resembled a giant rabbit.
[In 1950, it was made into a movie starring James Stewart.]

Dowling seemed to resent the many awards the play received, telling Audrey Wood, “It does-n’t seem dignified somehow.” She reminded him that he was benefitting financially from all the acclaim.

To its playwright, after years of struggle,
The Glass Menagerie
brought fame, adulation, and financial independence.

Summing it up, Tennessee said, “For the first time in my life, I’ve truly become Tennessee Williams.”

Months later, when he was traveling with his newly minted friend, Gore Vidal, the young novelist found the older playwright “coldly realistic.”

“Baby,” Tennessee said to Gore. “The playwright’s working career is a short one. There’s always somebody new to take your place.”

Before the year ended, the original cast gave a command performance of
The Glass Menagerie
in Washington. First Lady Bess Truman invited the cast to the White House for tea.

Hearing this, F.B.I Director J. Edgar Hoover telephoned the President, warning him that “Tennessee Williams is a degenerate and should not be honored at the White House.”

After he put down the phone, Truman told his aides, “To hell with that. The biggest degenerate in Washington is Hoover himself.”

Actually, Hoover need not have sounded an alarm. The night before, Tennessee had picked up a sailor in the Greyhound bus station in Washington, D.C., and consequently, slept through the tea at the White House. That night, when the play was actually presented, he appeared at the Presidential Box to apologize profusely to Mrs. Truman for not showing up.

[In the years to come, on the stage and on radio and in films, Tennessee would see many actresses play Amanda, including Fay Bainter, Anne Pitoniak, Jessica Tandy, Julie Harris, and Judith Ivey, among many others. But his favorite remained Laurette Taylor
.

The Glass Menagerie
was revived on Broadway in 1956, with Helen Hayes cast as Amanda. Critics found her performance “acceptable but lacking the magic of Laurette Taylor.” Maureen Stapleton, one of Tennessee’s favorite actresses, met the same fate when she played Amanda on Broadway in 1965
.

Even in the 21
^st
Century
, The Glass Menagerie
would continue its tradition of Broadway revivals. In 2005, a production starring Jessica Lange and Christian Slater drew mixed to negative reviews. In 2013, the American Repertory Theater staged another production, starring the Tony Award-winning actress, Cherry Jones, as Amanda, and Zachary Quin to as her son, Tom.]

***

The date was December 7, 1946, and Tennessee was living in New Orleans on St. Peter Street when he heard a friend shouting up the air shaft, “It’s just come over the radio. Laurette Taylor is dead.”

He was so stunned with the news that he couldn’t respond.

After two minutes of silence, his friend called up again. As Tennessee later revealed, the friend shouted up an appalling one-liner: “I knew you’d be disappointed.”

Tennessee was more than disappointed. He was heart-broken. He wrote a posthumous tribute to her, praising “the great warmth of her heart. There was a radiance about her art which I can compare only to the greatest lines of poetry, and which gave me the same shock of revelation as if the air about us had been momentarily broken through by light from some clear space beyond us.”

[At the time of her death, Laurette Taylor was too prominent an icon not to be celebrated by the entertainment community. In 1955, her daughter, Marguerite Courtney, published a widely respected, psychologically complex biographical tribute to her mother which modern-day reviewers define as one of the first books ever written from the point of view of the child of an alcoholic. In 1960, after a laborious search to find an actress who could capture the essence of the mercurial Taylor (Vivien Leigh was considered), Judy Holliday was cast in a show directed by José Quintero. When Holliday became ill and had to leave the show, which had been rancorously divided during rehearsals based on bickering between its creative team and its management, it closed without ever opening on Broadway.]

Still “holding a special place in my heart for Laurette,” Tennessee journeyed to Philadelphia to attend a performance of Judy Holliday playing Laurette during the period the play was still being fine-tuned for the Broadway opening that never happened.

He met and talked with
Laurette’s
director, José Quintero, who told him that, “Judy is dying. She’s got to leave the show. We’re closing in Philadelphia. I don’t plan to take it to Broadway with another star.”

After Tennessee praised Judy’s performance, she left to enter the hospital for throat surgery.

On June 7, 1956, after years of fighting the disease, she died from breast cancer two weeks before her 44
^th
birthday.

Tennessee later said, “I’m sorry the world didn’t get to see Judy Holliday as Laurette. She was wonderful in bringing Laurette back to life. Both Laurette and Judy died far too soon. The most sensitive moths fly too close to the flame. The dragonflies live forever.”

—Helen Hayes

While
The Glass Menagerie
played in Chicago, Helen Hayes was also starring there in a play entitled
Harriet
. She and Laurette Taylor had long been friends. Hayes often met with Tennessee and Laurette after their respective shows. He would take them to one of the State Street bars for a relaxing drink, limiting Laurette to just two cocktails because of her alcoholism.

In ill health, Laurette’s voice often failed her. Sometimes, Hayes arrived at Laurette’s hotel suite with an electric steam kettle to which she’d add decongestants in an attempt to help restore Laurette’s ailing throat. “I often stayed the night, leaving in the early morning after making sure Laurette could breathe properly. To save her vocal cords, she didn’t speak during the day.”

Laurette sensed that she might not be around by the time
The Glass Menagerie
opened in London. “She made me promise that if something happened to her, I would play Amanda on the stage in London,” Hayes said. “I promised her that I would, although I didn’t like the role of Amanda. She reminded me of all those aging Southern belles I had known during my youth in Washington. I also didn’t want to follow Laurette in a role she’d brilliantly made her own.”