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) (78 page)

His words were prophetic.

When Tallulah heard about this, she defended herself. “Great stars have great personalities, and they stamp that personality on each role they play. Take John Barrymore and Sarah Bernhardt.” Tallulah delivered her opinion in tones that eerily evoked Gloria Swanson playing Norma Desmond in
Sunset Blvd
. (1950).

Selznick agreed with her collaborative playwright. “The moth side of Blanche would be diminished by the tiger side of Tallulah.”

Of course, the stage role of Blanche DuBois was eventually awarded to Jessica Tandy, and the film role to Vivien Leigh, whose interpretation of Blanche earned her a second Oscar.

After Tallulah had been dumbfounded by the success of Tandy and Leigh in their respective interpretations of Blanche, she was very receptive when Jean Dalrymple approached her to offer her the same role in a limited two-week run at New York’s City Center in 1955. Since 1933, Dalrymple had consistently produced limited runs in repertory of successful plays starring Broadway names at popular prices.

“I never really liked the play,” Tallulah told Dalrymple. “But I’m more sympathetic to Tennessee because of something I read in the paper the other day. He told a reporter, ‘Tallulah is the strongest of all the hurt people I’ve ever known in my life.’”

When Dalrymple learned, to her amazement, that Tallulah had never seen the film version of
Streetcar
, she arranged a screening for her. “I detest Vivien Leigh ever since she stole the role of Scarlett from me.”

Dalrymple later said that after sitting through a screening of
Streetcar
, Tallulah was impressed, “But she could not bring herself to give Vivien a compliment.”

Later that night, Tallulah met with her best friend, Estelle Winwood. The aging actress told her, “Blanche DuBois will be the role of your career.”

“Oh,
dah-ling
, every playwright from Lillian Hellman to Thornton Wilder has used the same line on me.”

The following morning, Tallulah called Dalrymple and accepted the role, providing she could take home one-third of the box office receipts. Thinking Tallulah would be good box office, the producer gave in to this outrageous demand.

During the closing weeks of 1955, Dalrymple arranged for
Streetcar
to go into rehearsals at the Coconut Grove Playhouse near Miami. A young director, Herbert Machiz, was selected, with the understanding that this was the project that would catalyze his Broadway debut.

A week before rehearsals, Tallulah gave up drinking Old Granddad and tried to seriously tackle the complex role of Blanche. During her first meeting with Machiz, she was most gracious, but ominously added, “At times, I positively loathe Tennessee Williams and his fucking plays.”

Machiz was intimidated by their first meeting. “She’d slashed herself with a coat of her Elizabeth Arden lipstick. Instead of tearing into me, she read to me letters from famous personalities in the theater, including Noël Coward, attesting to her talent as a stage actress. I read the play to her, and we discussed it at length. She seemed very open to suggestions. But that was merely the warmup. The first impact of her in the role of Blanche would later descend like a Florida hurricane.”

“I do identify with Blanche,” Tallulah told Machiz. “She is a Southern woman who drinks too much and is morbidly concerned with aging and rapidly losing her once fabled beauty, and an aristocratic lady who has fallen on bad days and has been a bit promiscuous in her past.”

When Tennessee heard that Tallulah had arrived in Miami, he and his lover, Frank Merlo, drove up from their home in Key West to have dinner with the fading star.

They found her living in a mansion evocative of Norma Desmond’s palatial home as it was portrayed in
Sunset Blvd
. Donald Windham’s lover, Sandy Campbell, was staying in the building’s guest cottage. “Oh,
dah-ling
,” Tallulah said, greeting Tennessee, who introduced her to Frank. “You’ve given me a role, dear heart, that is harder to play than eighteen
King Lears
with a couple of
Hamlets
thrown in.”

After dinner, when Frank went to fetch the car, Tallulah whispered to Tennessee, in reference to Frank, “You are so very nice to love such a hideous person.”

That spectacularly callous statement, which caused Tennessee pain, was just the beginning of more hurt and sorrow to come for both of these strong, theatrical, ego-driven personalities.

“Frankly, Tallulah functioned better when Tennessee wasn’t present,” Machiz claimed. “Privately, he told me I was too weak to stand up against her. In his exact words, ‘Tallulah is pissing on my Blanche. You’ve got to eliminate her playing Tallulah with her whiplash movements and her bronchial laugh. And that voice of hers. It’s pure Tallulah, not the tremulous tone of Blanche. She’ll get laughs where none were intended.”
[As regards that final point, Tennessee was correct.]

There was an immediate conflict over casting for the role of Stella. Tennessee preferring one of his closest friends, the Russian-born actress, Maria St. Just.

In advance of their first meeting, Tennessee told her that St. Just was not only a talented actress, but resembled Tallulah enough to be her sister.

Tallulah detested St. Just on sight, denouncing Tennessee for bringing “this Cruikshankian cartoon into my presence. The nerve to say she looks like me! If she’s not immediately removed from my presence, I’m storming out of here. I will not appear with her. You get rid of this little strumpet or I’ll walk.”

[St. Just later told Tennessee that she was surprised that Tallulah knew what Cruikshankian meant. At the time, he didn’t know either. Sometime, during the period she had lived in London, she had learned that George Cruikshank (1792-1878) was a British caricaturist and illustrator of the works of Charles Dickens and other Victorian novelists.]

Later, Tennessee had dinner with Sandy Campbell, who was also his friend. “Tallulah’s performance is disgraceful,” he told the actor, who had been cast in
Streetcar
as the young man selling subscriptions to a newspaper. In the scene, Tallulah, as Blanche, flirts with him.

“You think you’ve got problems with Tallulah?” Campbell asked. “Last night, she took her role of Blanche flirting with me too far. She wanted me to fuck her. If faced with a gaping wound called a vagina, I would faint.”

Privately, Campbell telephoned his older lover, Donald Windham, to complain. “I am caught between a rock and a hard place. Tennessee is smashed all the time, and Tallulah is in a stupor, downing sleeping pills in an attempt to calm her hysteria.”

Windham advised “Get through it and it, too, will pass, and you’ll be back in my loving arms once again.”

[In New York and elsewhere, Tennessee and Frank had often bonded with Campbell and Windham as a gay couple to another gay couple.]

During rehearsals, Tennessee gave off mixed signals. After one of her tryouts, Tennessee climbed onto the stage and placed his head in Tallulah’s lap. Soothingly, he told her, “You are playing Blanche as I wrote her.”

Yet two hours later, he was threatening the producer, Jean Dalrymple, warning her that if Tallulah’s performance didn’t improve, he would shut down the play, not allowing it to open.

He had been goaded and encouraged by his iron-fisted friend, Maria St. Just, who had sat with him in the darkened theater. Tallulah, who hated her, would not have performed or emoted if she’d known that St. Just was in the audience. Throughout the course of Tallulah’s trial run, St. Just kept whispering vicious attacks on her performance into Tennessee’s ear.

Dakin Williams, Tennessee’s brother, flew to Miami and observed firsthand the conflicts between Tennessee and Tallulah. “The battle between them was one of total exasperation. He thought she was being too grand. At one point, he warned her that as Blanche, ‘You’re being too flossy. This isn’t Mayfair, you know.’ On another occasion, he gave her a beautiful and expensive (black) Mark Cross handbag. She threw it back at him, saying, ‘A lady always travels in brown. Never black. It’s impossible for you to understand what a lady is.’ They were often at each other’s throats.”

“And so they got through the trial run in Coconut Grove,” Dakin said. “
A Streetcar Named Desire
was headed for New York. It was going to be one hell of a bumpy ride, to borrow a line from Bette Davis.”

“Tennessee was drowning his sorrows in liquor and drugs. Tallulah was smoking marijuana—yes, this grand southern lady smoked pot before it became fashionable in the 60s. She also consumed a motley assortment of opiates. Before flying to New York, she told me she had to drink bourbon and branch water. ‘Otherwise, Dakin, I feel when I’m sober that people, especially your brother, don’t like me.’”

“Who could make this up?” Tennessee told Dakin before he departed. “And who is my Broadway baby? None other than the formidable Tallulah Bankhead. What in my life have I done to deserve such a fate?”

—Tennessee Williams, in an open letter to The New York Times

Tallulah’s opening night, February 15, 1956, at New York’s City Center evolved into both a disaster and a theatrical legend. “It was a gathering of the largest assemblage of gay men in the history of New York,” crowed a reporter-for the
New York Post
. “These men of all ages had come to see the actress they called ‘The Queen’s Queen.’ Almost any line in the play that Tallulah uttered was interpreted as a sexually loaded
double entendre.”

In the aftermath of opening night, the press attacks on her were devastating, with the demographics of the opening night audience factoring heavily into the coverage.

“Opening night was campy hero worship,” wrote critic Wolcott Gibbs. “There is, I suppose, no worship, no cure for this kind of vulgarity and stupidity in an audience, except possibly the employment of a machine-gun.”

Tallulah was livid with anger when she read that. “What is Gibbs advocating? Genocide? A new Holocaust against homosexuals?”

She became even more furious when Tennessee was quoted as having denounced the opening night audience, referring to them as “so many goddamn faggots.”

“Instead of America’s most sensitive and lyrical playwright, he sounds like some ignorant redneck from my home state of Alabama. No, I forget. He was born in Mississippi. I should send Mr. Williams a note informing him that some people consider
him
a goddamn faggot. Takes one to know one.”

One critic claimed that Blanche should not have been created “as a scapegoat for perverted gay humor,” suggesting that Tennessee should have realized that certain lines in
Streetcar
, when uttered by Tallulah, could be widely misinterpreted, exaggerated, and satirized when filtered through a flamboyantly campy gay sensibility.

Writing in
The Daily Mirror
, Robert Coleman claimed that “Bankhead took the first act and kidded the pants off it, mocking Tennessee’s words, satirizing them unmercifully.”

At one point during her performance, Blanche looked up at her Gentleman Caller, Mitch, who was standing nearby. With her eyes directed theatrically toward the sky, she delivered the line, “I’m looking for the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, but these girls are not out tonight. Oh, yes they are! There they are!” Then she pointed in the direction of the balcony, which was filled almost entirely with gay men. “God bless them, all in bunch, home from their little bridge party.”

That line, and Tallulah’s delivery, brought down the house, the laughter shaking the beams of the theater for a full five minutes.

The talented actress, Anne Meacham, the understudy for Stella in that production of the play, told Darwin Porter, “The gay men turned that moment on the stage into their private
Hallelujah Chorus
.”

The ballerina, Tamara Geva, with her then-husband, actor John Emery, attended the opening night party. Emery had been Tallulah’s first and only husband. Geva remembered passing by a bedroom, where, through the open door, she spotted Tallulah, alone, crying.

After the opening night hysteria, the reaction the following night was remarkably different. The audience was filled for the most part with conventional, middle-aged theater-goers who had been ardent Tallulah theater fans back in the 1930s and early 40s. There wasn’t one unwanted laugh all evening.

Saul Colin, writing in London’s
Plays and Players
, defined Tallulah’s performance as “her best since Lillian Hellman’s
The Little Foxes
. She was deep and tender, violent and sufficiently insane to appear normal, moving and coy, suffering yet concealing pain, a new dimension never encountered during the magnificent performances of Jessica Tandy, Uta Hagen, or Vivien Leigh.”

Thomas R. Dash of
Women’s Wear Daily
wrote that Tallulah gave “a performance that evokes all the subtle facets of Blanche’s character, distilling the anguish, the heartbreak, and the pathos of a woman of tender sensibilities.”