Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (47 page)

Burl Ives in the dressing room during a production of
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

In the original ending, most of which Williams restored for the 1974 Broadway production and the play’s subsequent republication, Brick refuses to surrender to Maggie and her blandishments. “What do you say?” she says. “I don’t say anything. I guess there’s nothing to say,” he replies. His hatred for himself and for Maggie remains immutable; he submits to nothing but his own destructiveness. Nonetheless, Maggie whispers, “I
do
love you, Brick. I
do
!” Echoing Big Daddy’s fierce words, in the play’s curtain line, Brick says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that was true?” This ending, according to Williams, was appropriately hard for a play that said only one affirmative thing about man’s fate: “that he has it still in his power not to squeal like a pig but to keep a tight mouth about it . . . and also that love is possible: not
proven
or
disproven
, but possible.”

ON OPENING NIGHT, March 24, 1955, at the Morosco Theatre on Forty-Fifth Street, Williams took his seat beside Britneva, who was his date. During the first act, he was agitated, muttering to himself so loudly that people around him had to shush him. He and Britneva sat out most of the second half at a bar across from the theater; they returned to watch the crucial final scene between Maggie and Brick. “The New York opening of
Cat
was particularly dreadful,” Williams recalled in
Memoirs
. The audience ovation and the backstage bravado only intensified his moroseness. By some miscue, Wood and Liebling did not go to celebrate with Williams at Kazan’s house afterward; misreading their absence as a judgment on the evening, Williams took umbrage. When they met up later at the cast party, according to Wood, Williams “was in such a state of anger he would not speak to me. He behaved as if he were a deserted child who’d been abandoned in a snow-storm by untrustworthy relatives, or hurtful friends.”

As diminutive and regal as she was, Wood was also the embodiment of Broadway commerce, a purveyor of quality goods: she had encouraged a full-length play, a third act, the return of Big Daddy, and a satisfying ending that gave Brick and Maggie at least some glimmer of hope. Williams, who judged the first night “a failure, a distortion of what I had intended,” acted out his fury with the one person he trusted most in the world. He told Wood that she had ruined his play. Wood wanted to go home, but Liebling convinced Williams to go with them to get the first-night reviews.

“The wait for the morning notices to come out was one of the most unendurable intervals of my life,” Williams said. They picked up the papers and went over to Forty-Third Street and Broadway to pore over them at Toffenetti’s. “ ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ is Mr. Williams’s finest drama,” Brooks Atkinson wrote, adding, “Always a seeker after honesty in his writing, Mr. Williams has not only found a solid part of the truth but found the way to say it with complete honesty.” “Mr. Williams is the man of our time who comes closest to hurling the actual blood and bone of life onto the stage,” Walter Kerr said in the
Herald Tribune
. To Williams, each rave review—“the production has no flaw” (Walter Kerr), “enormous theatrical power” (Richard Watts Jr.,
New York
Post
)—was as much cause for laceration as celebration. He was convinced that, for commercial success, he had sold out the truth of his characters and his heart. In silence, at three o’clock in the morning, Williams, Wood, and Liebling sat together in a booth while Williams read his thick stack of opening-night telegrams one by one. “He studiously refused to permit us to see any of his messages. He continued to behave as if he were completely alone,” the bemused Wood recalled. She and Liebling were witnessing in person what Williams had just dramatized in
Cat
: “the shocking
duality
of the single heart.”

Williams’s bread-and-butter note to Atkinson the next day—“Now that you’ve written your lovely notice I can tell you that I would have just died if you hadn’t liked and praised ‘Cat,’ ” he began—was full of self-loathing for his “fearful lack of security,” his “abysmal self-doubt,” his “invidious resentment of [William] Inge’s great success,” his “hideous competitiveness which I never had in me before!” In a postscript, Williams added:

Some time I would like you to read the original (first) version of Cat before I re-wrote Act III for production purposes. Both versions will be published, and, confidentially, I do mean confidentially, I still much prefer the original. It was harder and purer: a blacker play but one that cut closer to the bone of the truth I believe. I doubt that it would have had the chance of success that the present version has and since I had so desperate a need of success, and reassurance about my work, I think all in all Kazan was quite right in persuading me to shape Act III about the return of Big Daddy.

The published version of the play contained both the original and the Broadway versions. Williams perpetuated the legend of the play and its “commercial ending” in the accompanying essay “Note of Explanation,” in which he portrayed himself as a hapless author victimized by the exigencies of commercial theater and the power of his director. “I wanted Kazan to direct the play, and though these suggestions were not made in the form of an ultimatum, I was fearful that I would lose his interest if I didn’t re-examine the script from this point of view,” he wrote. These weasel words, as Kazan later pointed out, “gave people generally the idea that I had forced you to rewrite ‘Cat.’ I can’t force you to rewrite anything, first because you are strong, secondly because you are protected by your Guild.” Kazan went on, “I’ve come to the conclusion that somehow you were willing to have me blamed for the faults in your plays, while you were praised for their virtues.”

Williams owed Kazan more than he could admit to himself, or to the public. The thrust of the original version of
Cat
had certainly changed, but so had the play’s clarity, depth, structure, and dynamism. It won every theatrical award for best play, including the Pulitzer Prize. By May 1955, the production had paid back its original investment of $102,000; it went on to play almost seven hundred performances. Williams owed Kazan, as he acknowledged in a letter, “a success when I had given up thought of anything but failure, and a sort of vague whimpering end to life.”

In early July, Wood informed Williams that she was about to ask for half a million dollars from MGM, which wanted the play as a vehicle for Grace Kelly. “Figures stagger imagination approve get the loot,” Williams wired back. Wood did as she was told. “You and I have come to know how difficult it is to get a hit play in New York City,” she wrote to Williams afterward. “There are not too many ‘Streetcars’ and not too many ‘Cats on Tin Roofs’ in one man’s lifetime for us to know no matter how well a man writes and how skilled he is as a playwright that it is improbable and very often impossible to continue writing good plays for any long amount of time. This is why I am more proud than usual to have been able to deliver the Metro-Goldwyn deal.”

The cash and the kudos only intensified Williams’s guilt and gripes. “I think he [Kazan] cheapened ‘Cat,’ still think so, despite the prizes,” Williams wrote Wood. “That doesn’t mean I doubt his good intentions, or don’t like him, now, it’s just that I don’t want to work with him again on a basis in which he will tell me what to do and I will be so intimidated, and so anxious to please him, that I will be gutlessly willing to go against my own taste and convictions.” Like Brick with Maggie, Williams projected onto Kazan his own moral failure and turned it into a kind of legend of betrayal. “I was terribly distressed by ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,’ although I’m living on it and it’s made me more money than anything else,” he told Edward R. Murrow in a 1960 CBS TV interview. “People tell me it came off, but for me it didn’t. It seemed almost like a prostitution or a corruption.”

The corruption, however, was Williams’s. Ten days before the New York opening, Kazan had offered to reinstate Williams’s original, preferred third act. “You never stated that in your preface,” Kazan wrote, in a letter that would end their professional relationship in 1960. “Nor did you note that I offered repeatedly to put your original third act into the road company. You made the decision not to. It’s been four years now that this horseshit has been in the press. . . . YOU NEVER ONCE SAID A WORD!! . . . You should have come to my defense long ago. Ask yourself the reason why you didn’t.”

“ONE’S ENEMY IS always part of oneself,” Williams wrote to Britneva in the slipstream of
Cat
’s success. Williams’s need for triumph had trumped his sense of truth. “A failure reaches fewer people, and touches fewer, than does a play that succeeds,” he wrote. Still, Williams needed to believe in the purity of his literary endeavor. A combination of vainglory and guilt compelled him to renounce the successful version. He couldn’t quite admit his bad faith, or his dependence on Kazan, whose collaboration was essential not only to his success but also to his poetic expression. Williams felt shamed both by his calculated betrayal of the play and by his pleasure at its success. That shame had enormous reverberations; it consigned him, at the peak of his acclaim and his wealth, to the psychological penance of a half-life, “a sort of a lunar personality without the shine,” as he described himself at the time. That summer he wandered aimlessly around Europe struggling to evade the truth of his artistic compromise. “I am running away from something, but don’t know what I am running away from,” he wrote to Wood from Barcelona in July 1955. “Each new place disappoints me, after a couple of days it seems like an awful mistake to have gone there. But when I return to Rome, that’s no good either.” Williams’s real disappointment was with himself.

Williams’s losses that year were not just moral or aesthetic. His grandfather, Reverend Walter Dakin, his totem of luck and love, had died, at ninety-seven, just before the rehearsals of
Cat
began. In the middle of the summer, another true believer—Margo Jones—died, at the age of forty-three, apparently from accidental inhalation of a toxic carpet cleaner; she was buried with the brooch that Williams had given her at the Broadway opening of
Summer and Smoke
. In August, the set designer Lemuel Ayers—the only member of Williams’s Iowa theater class to praise the quality of the dialogue and the atmosphere in the disastrous full-length play
Spring Storm
, thereby convincing Williams not to give up on theater—died at the age of forty. Each of these figures was a mainstay of Williams’s art and his integrity. In his perfervid imagination, their deaths took on symbolic weight and added to his sense of his life as sullied and unmoored. “The reaper is not only grim but active and rapid this season,” he wrote to Wood in late August.

According to the unedited manuscript of his memoirs, Williams that summer wrote only under the influence of stimulants. In his new one-act play “The Enemy: Time,” he described this condition as “the drugged state of semi-oblivion which is what an artist has left when he abandons his art.” Writing in the white heat of his internal crisis over
Cat
, the new play was “an examination of what is really corrupt in life,” an exploration of the vying torments of his humiliation and his ambition. In
Camino Real
, he had written about the difference between the will to be good and the will to be great. The ructions around
Cat
made him agonizingly aware of the gap between the two urges in his own character. “I believe very strongly in the existence of good,” Williams said. “I believe that honesty, understanding, sympathy, and even sexual passion are good.” His longing for goodness was broadcast in the last speech of the first draft of “The Enemy: Time,” a sort of prayer for blessing and purity: “Oh, Lady, wrap me in your starry blue robe, make my heart a perpetual novena.” Williams was aware, however, that he had traded in his big heart for a hard heart. “It is hard for me to like any playwright who is still writing plays,” he wrote to Wood at the end of his “vague summer.” “Miller, yes! Inge, sometimes . . . an ugly effect of the competitive system. They have to stun me with splendor that drives vanity out! Or I wish they’d quit writing as I have nearly this summer.”

In April 1955, just after
Cat
opened, Williams entertained Carson McCullers in Key West; although he had paid for his friend’s ticket, McCullers’s presence made him feel emotionally bankrupt. “It’s much easier to give money than love,” he wrote to Britneva, who had nicknamed McCullers “Choppers.” “Choppers needs love, but I am not the Baa-Baa-Black Sheep with three bags full for Choppers. I don’t even have any for the Master or the Dame or the Little Boy Down the Lane. I care only, very much, about the studio mornings at the Olivetti.” That summer, Williams was unable even to manufacture the energy to charm Anna Magnani, who had just finished filming
The Rose Tattoo
and whom he was now trying to corral for both a Broadway production and the film of
Orpheus Descending
. “Magnani is outspokenly puzzled by my behavior, and I’m afraid we may lose her simply because I act like a Zombie whenever I am with her,” he told Wood.

Williams was still adamantly hiding from himself and from others the bitter fact of his duplicity. “I am determined to express just me, not a director or actors,” he wrote later that year to Wood, refusing to beef up the role of Val in
Orpheus Descending
in order to lure Marlon Brando. He added, “Almost everybody of taste that I have talked to about ‘Cat’ are disturbed and thrown off somewhat by a sense of falsity, in the ending, and I don’t want this to ever happen again, even if it means giving up the top-rank names as co-workers.” But even as Williams wrote these words, he was angling for Kazan to do the literary, heavy lifting on their two-year film collaboration,
Hide and Seek
. “Have to finish the film-script for Gadg and really don’t know what more to do with the thing,” he wrote to Britneva in June. “Catch-as-Catch-Can [Kazan] just says re-write, re-write, re-write, and I don’t know what the hell for or about.” Over the next few months, from Williams’s various drafts and rewrites, often dispatched with the instructions “Insert Somewhere,” Kazan assembled the script for the film, which was retitled
Baby Doll
—a work for which, at Wood’s insistence, Williams took full screen credit and received an Academy Award nomination.