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) (56 page)

Gassman was aware that Tennessee had rewritten his
Battle of Angels
, retitling it
Orpheus Descending
. At first, Tennessee thought he was “courting me so he could play Val Xavier.”

That, however, was not the case. He told Tennessee that when he and Shelley had lived in Hollywood, they had become close friends with Valentina Cortese, and her husband, the strikingly handsome actor, Richard Basehart, whom she’d married in 1951.

Gassman said that “both Dick and Valentina want to be cast in the leads for your Broadway production of
Orpheus Descending.”

Privately, Tennessee had reservations about such casting, fearing Valentina was too young and beautiful for the role of “Lady.” Basehart, however, in a snakeskin jacket might be enough of a sexual dynamo to be a convincing Val Xavier. Tennessee promised Gassman that he’d meet with both actors and discuss his revised play with them.

What took place after dinner between Gassman and Tennessee was revealed to author Donald Wind-ham.

“Tenn told me that Gassman was rather matter-of-fact and most sophisticated about
après
dinner activities,” Windham said. “He said the actor returned with him to his hotel room, where they had two more drinks.”

“He just stood in front of me and removed all his clothing and then went and lay down in the middle of my bed,” Tennessee said. “He then invited me to come over and enjoy him.”

“You wrote such a good role for me as Stanley, so I figured you deserved to find out firsthand what turned on Shelley,” Gassman said to Tennessee.

“Vittorio tasted as good as he looked,” Tennessee told Windham. “A magnificent specimen of manhood. There was no foreplay. I was invited to go right for the target, and after about twenty minutes of intense activity on my part—after all, he’d had two bottles of wine—Mount Vesuvius erupted.”

“After he got dressed, we ended the evening most formally,” Tennessee said. “I expected at least a kiss on the cheek, but got a firm handshake instead. He congratulated me on being the world’s greatest living playwright. I knew that already. What I wanted him to tell me was that I was the world’s greatest cocksucker. If not that, at least better than Shelley.”

After talking to Gassman, Basehart contacted Tennessee for a dinner rendezvous. Tennessee just assumed that he would show up with his wife, Valentina Cortese, but he came alone.

Tennessee had seen both stars when they appeared together in
The House on Telegraph Hill
(1951). He’d been particularly impressed with Basehart’s performance in the 1954 film
La Strada
, directed by Federico Fellini.

When Tennessee first met Basehart, he’d just finished playing Ishmael in Herman Melville’s
Moby Dick
, released in 1956. Years later, in 1962, Tennessee would see him miscast, playing the
Führer
in the film,
Hitler. “
Who could possibly believe this handsome stud was Adolf?” Tennessee asked after sitting through the film.

Tennessee later bragged to Windham that he had also managed to seduce Basehart. “To the public, I always claim that I never go to bed with actors, especially those hoping to get a role. But that’s just what I say in public. You know yourself I don’t mean a word of that. Like any self-respecting homosexual, I seize upon every opportunity. What is a sex addict to do?”

“I think Gassman had cued Basehart on what to do,” Tennessee said. “I’m sure he reported on our experience in my hotel room. With Basehart, it was a repeat of the same performance with Vittorio. He stripped off his clothing, including his boxer shorts, revealing Grade A government-inspected meat. The soft lighting in the room was perfect to display his body to me. He slowly walked around the room, giving me a chance to observe his body in motion. He was a beautiful man with his clothes on. Without his clothes, he was gorgeous. Gassman got away from me, but I insisted Basehart spend the night because I also wanted to make love to him in the rosy glow of dawn. He didn’t protest. He slept beside me, snoring lightly. I was tempted to attack him in the middle of the night, the way I do with Frankie, but I contained my impulse until he woke up the next morning.”

“Regrettably, after all that work,” Tennessee said, “Basehart did not get to play Val, and his beautiful wife was not offered the role of Lady. Perhaps those two could have pulled it off. They certainly did make a lovely couple as long as their marriage lasted. They divorced in 1960.”

In the late 1950s, Tennessee often worked in his Manhattan apartment on East 58
^th
Street while Frank remained at their home in Key West. As their relationship deteriorated, Tennessee wrote “A Separate Poem” to express his feeling about “the collapsing bridge across the river that separates Frankie and me.”

Oh, yes, we’ve lost our island…

Our travels ranged wide of our island, but nowhere nearly so far

Of what cannot be spoken
.

When we speak to each other

We speak of things that mean nothing of what we meant

To each other…a storm of things unspoken
.

Windham said, “Tennessee was rich now, and didn’t really need Frankie any more. He could afford servants. If he wanted sex, there were dozens of available wannabe actors or even major movie stars willing to drop trou for him. My god, even Elvis Presley wanted to play in movie adaptations by those ‘queer writers, William Inge and Tennessee Williams.’”

“In the late 1950s, Tennessee was writing—how shall I put this delicately?—with a system filled with chemicals,” Windham said. “That sounds so much better than ‘drugs.’”

Plagued with constant anxiety, Tennessee indulged in substance abuse. He smoked two packages of cigarettes a day and drank at least a fifth of liquor, sometimes a lot more. He constantly downed pills. He spoke openly about his dependency on barbiturates, asserting “They unblocked my creative forces.”

Many doctors disputed his claim about these mood-altering drugs, claiming that they had the opposite effect by “blunting his creative spark.”

In 1957, after the commercial and critical failure of
Orpheus Descending
, and partly because of his collapsing relationship and ongoing crises with Frank, Tennessee became deeply depressed and underwent counseling, consulting a Freudian psychoanalyst, Dr. Lawrence Kubie, five times a week.

The doctor gave him some amazing advice, at least according to Tennessee. He claimed that he was urged to abandon Frank and covert to heterosexuality. Of course, that would necessitate a prolonged roster of dubious treatments and procedures.

Not only that, but the doctor, at least according to Tennessee, advised him to give up playwrighting. That latter claim seems especially dubious, but nevertheless, Tennessee insisted that it was true.

“For the first time in my life, I was so depressed that—at least for a while—I gave up sex entirely,” Tennessee said. “Celibate as a priest. On the other hand, ‘celibate as a priest’ is not the right phrase, considering some of the priests I’ve known or heard about.”

Eventually, Tennessee and Dr. Kubie ended their professional relationship. The doctor claimed that Tennessee was giving interviews in which he discussed his psychoanalysis. “As a result of those interviews, I’m losing some of my best patients,” the doctor said.

Tennessee decided to ignore any further professional advice about abandoning his writing. Even though he was often devastated by the critical attacks on his reputation and his declining popularity, he continued to write almost every day. “I don’t allow my decline to stop me, because I have the example of so many playwrights before me. I know the dreadful notices Henrik Ibsen got. So I keep writing. I am sometimes pleased with what I do—for me, that’s enough.”

Indeed, he continued to write one “critical stinker” after another, some ofthem closing after only a dozen or so performances.

At around this time, an American screen-writer, Meade Roberts, got to know and observe both Frank and Tennessee. Tennessee had gone to see a play by Roberts off-Broadway. It was called
A Palm Tree in a Rose Garden
. Inaugurated in November of 1957, it featured Barbara Baxley, one of Tennessee’s favorite actresses, as the star.

Roberts was later hired to adapt Tennessee’s
Orpheus Descending
to the screen, which he did under the revised title,
The Fugitive Kind
, starring Marlon Brando. Roberts also would adapt
Summer and Smoke
for the screen in 1961. He also wrote
The Stripper
(1963), starring Joanne Woodward, adapted from the William Inge play,
A Loss of Roses
.

Roberts later said that Tennessee told him, “I am insanely jealous of Bill.” Both had dramas opening on Broadway in 1957, Inge’s
Dark at the Top of the Stairs
and Tennessee’s
Orpheus Descending
. Whereas Inge’s play was a big hit, Tennessee’s play flopped.

“I could kick myself for introducing Bill to Audrey Wood, who later became his agent,” Tennessee told Roberts. “I think Bill writes better regional dialogue than I do. Whereas he’s Audrey’s gentleman playwright, I’m her degenerate playwright.”

Later, in Manhattan, when Frank was introduced to Roberts, he told him, “Tenn refuses to believe how much I love him. He goes around telling people that I will welcome his death so I can grab his millions.”

Biographer Ronald Hayman wrote: “Tennessee felt certain he was unlovable, and his inability to believe the reality of Frank’s love for him was even harder for Frank to accept than Tennessee’s infidelities. Taking care of his lover had been not only Frank’s main pleasure, but also his primary occupation. The more unneeded and redundant he felt, the more he neglected to take care of himself.”

By January of 1960, Frank’s health began to fail. He snapped at friends and was constantly fatigued. He cut off all sexual relations with Tennessee. Depressed and moody, he spent most of his days in bed. Every morning, he stepped on the scales, horrified at his increasing weight loss.

Frank did fly back to New York for a meeting with Tennessee in Audrey Wood’s office to clarify his business arrangement with Tennessee. She told him that she would continue to send him ten percent of any royalties from productions of
The Rose Tattoo, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, and
Camino Real
, plus an allowance of $150 a week. Tennessee also turned over to him the deeds to two “conch houses in Key West.” These were clapboard-sided fishermen’s cottages which Frank rented out for extra income.

After the meeting with Wood, Tennessee told Frank goodbye, claiming he was going to pay a visit to Marlon Brando’s apartment. He wanted to go alone, but Frank insisted on accompanying him.

Tennessee and Frank greeted Brando like old friends.

“Hon, the old faggot has come back into your life,” Tennessee said to Brando, warmly embracing him.

“You never left,” Brando said.

Over drinks—far too many for Tennessee—he told Brando that he feared he was going to become a library author instead of one whose plays are actually revived and performed.

Brando countered that he was going to become an actor written about in film schools instead of one seen on the screen. He told them that while making
The Fugitive Kind
, he’d taken a plane back to Los Angeles every weekend to edit and shorten the only film he had ever personally directed, the 1961 Western,
One-Eyed Jacks
, the way-over-budget film in which he also starred. “The God damn thing drove me into bankruptcy and ran up to eight hours.”

He said that the other day, a college student had sent him his thesis. As part of an academic study, the student had maintained that
One-Eyed Jacks
was a homosexual movie. The thesis had claimed that Sam Gilman, Brando’s best friend, who was also cast in the film, performed with “sexual innuendo” when playing opposite Brando’s character of Rio. “In fact, the conclusion was that Sam Gilman and I, along with the rest of the cast, had made a homosexual movie.”