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) (77 page)

With the hopes
that she’d accept the role of the misguided matriarch, Amanda, director Irving Rapper sent Bette Davis the script for the film version of Tennessee Williams’
The Glass Menagerie
, to be filmed on the soundstages of Warner Brothers.

This was a surprise, because Davis was in disgrace with her longtime studio after the bitter blood over her last film appearance there. Horribly miscast and far too old, she’d played Rosa Moline in the 1949 box office disaster,
Beyond the Forest
with Joseph Cotten. The picture had been “condemned” by the Legion of Decency, and had ended Davis’ career at Warner Brothers.

Yet although she was desperately in need of a good part, Davis rejected the role, writing to Rapper with, “I may have been too old to play Rosa Moline, but Mother Goddamn is far too young to take on mother roles, especially to a full grown girl.”

[Davis would also miss out on the two best female roles Tennessee ever wrote—that of Blanche DuBois in
A Streetcar Named Desire
and that of Violet Venable
in Suddenly Last Summer.
]

When Tallulah Bankhead heard that Davis had turned down the role based on an age issue, she said, “So, the Bitch Goddess has rejected the part, falsely claiming she’s too young to play Amanda. Who does she think I am? Methuselah’s mother?”

[Fortunately for Davis and her career, at around this same time, Claudette Colbert fell and seriously injured her back. Davis stepped in at the last minute to replace her in what became her most memorable role, that of Margo Channing in the classic
All About Eve
(1950).]

Still in need of an actress for the matriarchal lynchpin, Rapper called Tallulah and delicately asked if she’d agree to a screen test for Tennessee’s Amanda.

“I don’t faint at the idea,” she said. “Perhaps you’ve heard I did a screen test to play a certain Miss Scarlett O’Hara. David O. Selznick, the shithead, thought I’d be better suited to play Belle Watkins, the whorehouse madam. Type casting, I’d call it. Of course, I’ll submit to a screen test. Who in hell do you think I am? Katharine Hepburn? Bette Davis, God forbid? What a choice. Bette Davis or Hepburn. The choice is between a psychotic and a militant dyke.”

Consequently, Rapper flew to Manhattan to conduct the screen test in the stifling heat of one of the city’s hottest Augusts. He had dinner with Tallulah at her home, called Windows, in Connecticut. Over dinner, during which she drank only water, she said, “I love the idea of playing a Southern lady with pretensions of grandeur. I myself am an Alabama belle with actual grandeur. I don’t have to pretend. Besides, I know how a Southern lady speaks more than Tennessee Williams. I could practically write Amanda’s dialogue myself.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Rapper told her, diplomatically. “Tennessee has done such an admirable job.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” she said. “After all, Tennessee also fancies himself a Southern lady. I mean, let’s face it: Tennessee
is
Blanche DuBois.” Then she cackled at her own wit.

The screen test for
The Glass Menagerie
would span a period of four days, during which Tallulah told Rapper, “Her interpretation of Amanda brought that broken down drunken old hag, Laurette Taylor, acclaim on Broadway. My film role of Amanda will bring me that Oscar those idiots at the Academy denied me for my role in
Lifeboat.”

During the first three days, Tallulah cooperated with Rapper, although she had had reservations about working with him at first. After all, he was known in Hollywood as Bette Davis’s director, having helmed her in such classics as
Now, Voyager
(1942).

On her first day, Rapper came by her dressing room to check on her wardrobe for the test. He found her wearing only high heels and a turban. “How do you like my girlish figure,
dahling?”
she asked him.

Rapper admitted later, “As for her figure, the leaves of autumn had started to fall. Marilyn Monroe she isn’t. Who is Marilyn Monroe, you ask? Wait a few months. Soon all of
tout
Hollywood will know who Marilyn is. I fucked her right before flying to New York.”

In her stuffy New York dressing room, Tallulah looked at her tired face in the mirror. “I’m always playing the odds against tomorrow,” she said. It was as if she were rehearsing the first line from her screen test in which Amanda begins to face the fact that that wicked old goddess, Time, was passing her by.

During the previous two weeks, Tallulah had diligently refrained from alcohol. After her first day of emoting for the camera, Rapper had pronounced her “letter perfect.”

For three days, Tallulah continued filming, Rapper finding her consistently brilliant. He telephoned Jack Warner with the good news, although the studio mogul was very skeptical. It seemed as if he could picture only Olivia de Havilland in the role.

One scene almost brought a tear to Rapper’s eyes. Tallulah, as Amanda, had to repair the hem of her daughter’s dress, during which procedure she confronts the reality that her Laura is crippled with a withered leg. “The pathos on Tallulah’s face was remarkable. She’d become Amanda, even better than the version Tennessee had put on paper.”

Then came the fourth and ultimately defining day.

Rapper had scheduled a scene with Tallulah and Ralph Meeker, who had scored a major hit on Broadway when he’d starred in William Inge’s
Picnic
.

“Meeker is up for the role of The Gentleman Caller,” Rapper said. “This final test is really about him, not you. You have only four lines.”

“I’ve seen Meeker in
Picnic
,” Tallulah said. “My only fear is that I will not be able to restrain myself on camera and that I’ll tear his clothes off and rape him. He’s so goddamn sexy.”

For reasons never fully explained, Tallulah on the day of her final test seemed to experience a momentary nervous breakdown, as if the anxieties of facing the reality of the camera had overwhelmed her. That morning, before she was scheduled for her appearance on the set, she’d downed one fifth of a gallon of Old Granddad.

When called, she swaggered onto the set on unsteady feet. “Rapper, you cocksucker,” she shouted at him in front of the crew. “I’ll direct this scene myself. Hell, I was making movies before you were born. No, come to think of it, you were around in 1918 to see me in my Silents, such as
When Men Betray, Thirty a Week
, and
Who Loved Him Best
. With me directing this big-dick stud here, Meeker will be better than Jack,”
[She was making an obvious reference to John Barrymore, her former lover.]

At one point, she leered lecherously at Meeker, “Take it out, Good Looking. Let’s see if you’ve got a two-hander.”

The test, of course, was a disaster. Rapper claimed “Tallulah must have thought she was rehearsing for the role of that alcoholic singer, Lillian Roth, in
I’ll Cry Tomorrow
(1955)
.”

Although Rapper tried to conceal results of the final day’s test from Jack Warner, a spy on the set reported the full details to the studio honcho, who was horrified.

He called Rapper, shouting, “Bankhead is out! We’ve already got our resident lush. His name is Errol Flynn. We don’t need a female lush! My dream casting has fallen apart. I’m going with Gertrude Lawrence as Amanda and Reagan’s former bitch, Jane Wyman, as Laura. Good luck with those two. Just don’t let Wyman snip off your balls the way she did with Reagan. Speaking of him, I need to get rid of that joker like I did Dame Davis, your favorite actress. By the way, her tits have fallen.”

Then he slammed down the phone.

Tallulah Bankhead always claimed that Tennessee created the role of Blanche DuBois in
A Streetcar Named Desire
with her in mind for the lead on Broadway. She also said that he had sent her the first draft of the play, and that she had rejected it because of its use of the word “nigger.”

“As a Southern lady, I could not utter that word on the stage, and Tennessee refused to omit the line and write in something more appropriate.”

This seemed too simplistic a justification for rejecting the role of Blanche. There were other problems, the most compelling of which she confided to novelist James Kirkwood (
A Chorus Line)
and to Darwin Porter one night at her town-house. “Personally, I don’t want to let this get out, but I’ve always detested the plays of Tennessee and his take on Southern degeneracy. I’m degenerate enough without depicting it on the stage.”

“There’s another reason,” she continued. “Brando and I nearly came to blows—no, not those kind of blows
, dahling
—when we starred together in Jean Cocteau’s
The Eagle Has Two Heads
. I think we would have assassinated each other if we’d starred together on Broadway. Did I tell you that at one point during the Cocteau play, during one of my big speeches, that Brando turned his back to the audience and urinated against the props?”

Even before Tallulah rejected the role of Blanche, Tennessee had second thoughts when he met with Irene Mayer Selznick, the producer. “I fear Tallulah would stamp too much of her own personality onto Blanche.”