Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (64 page)

The blockbuster name that finally gave the Broadway production commercial viability was “that wonderful old bitch” Bette Davis, who signed on to play the blowsy, sluttish widow Maxine Faulk. Davis, who in 1949 was the highest-paid woman in America, earning $10,285 a week, was by 1961 financially strapped and looking for a movie comeback. She last appeared on the legitimate Broadway stage in 1929. Williams was dubious. “Granted she is a name, one of the biggest, and has had the scarcely credible humility to offer to play the second female part,” he told Wood. But he had concerns: “Is she physically right for the part, and still more important, does she have the right style for it? If she played it like almost any of her film roles, since ‘Human Bondage,’ the effect might be very funny in a very wrong way, and I say this as a great fan of Bette Davis.”

To Williams, Maxine was the “living definition of nature: lusty, rapacious, guileless, unsentimental”; Davis, by contrast, was the living definition of artifice—the Hollywood star system. The fifty-three-year-old actress may have been nearly a decade older than Maxine’s suggested age; she may have had a potbelly, a sagging chest, and a coarseness that had evolved over a decade of hard drinking and brawling with the actor Gary Merrill, her recently divorced fourth husband; nevertheless, she was a box-office beauty. With an unknown—Patrick O’Neal—playing the male lead, the producers had eyes only for her drawing power. According to Corsaro, who was against the ploy, Bowden told Davis that “the play wasn’t completely finished,” and she signed with the understanding “that her part was going to be developed.” Corsaro warned the team that “when she discovers that the play is not really about Maxine Faulk, we’re going to have a great storm on our hands.” For his part, with all his theatrical ducks now in a row, Williams was sanguine. “I love the play and I love the players, and the rest is prayer,” he wrote to Bowden five days before the
Iguana
campaign began, which Williams would later call his “longest and most appalling tour I’ve had with a play.”

The first read-through was held in the Stratford Suite of the Algonquin Hotel on October 9, 1961. Davis arrived seven minutes late in a black pancake hat, with her hair loose to her shoulders and her mouth “over made-up like a mailbox,” as the stage manager, John Maxtone-Graham, observed in his tart diary account of the eleven-week pre-Broadway tryout. When they began rehearsals at the Belasco the next day, the division between Davis and the rest of the cast was made physical. Bowden had arranged for bleachers to be set up in front of the playing area for the company to sit on; for Davis, he created a special space apart. “No one was to go near,” Corsaro said. “It was a horrendous atmosphere.” Davis’s first words to Margaret Leighton only reinforced the sense of her separation from the rest of the production. “We don’t have to be friends, do we, to work together?” Davis said. By the third day of rehearsals—in “a piece of superb one-upsmanship,” as Maxtone-Graham noted—Leighton had learned all her lines while Davis, who hadn’t acted onstage in twenty-five years, was still struggling with the book, knowing nothing. “She was frightened to death, you could tell: the hands were cold when they grabbed you,” Corsaro said.

Davis objected to the unpredictable mannerisms of her introverted leading man; she objected to the size of her part; she objected to the internal practices of the Method. At one point, when Corsaro was trying to explain the sexual subtext between Maxine and Shannon, he recalled, “she came up behind me and put her tits against my back, grabbed me, and rubbed. ‘That’s what is needed here. Right out,’ she said.” When Davis wasn’t running her scenes, she either paced and smoked inside her exclusive area—“doing Bette Davis,” as Corsaro put it—or sat smirking and glowering at the actors. In the first week, according to Corsaro, Leighton played Hannah “unfortunately as a very conventional spinster; she was not showing herself.” Corsaro took her aside and suggested an attitude adjustment. “When you come in, you own this place, you already know everything about it. You’re not begging—you are the mistress of the inn,” he told her. The advice gave Leighton’s Hannah a new, quiet, but startling authority. “She was marvelous,” Corsaro said. “Davis was looking at her in horror, because suddenly this woman was transformed. From that moment on Davis became a demon.”

Before the show even began its tryouts, Davis quit twice. Her first blowup came at the beginning of the second week, when she dressed down her leading man in front of the company. “I’m sick of this Actors Studio
shit
,” she screamed at O’Neal, who bolted out of the theater. “When she is on a rampage . . . she projects rather like the man who calls the states at national conventions,” Maxtone-Graham noted. At one point, Corsaro knocked on her door; getting no response, he opened it. “This was the sight: Bowden and Tennessee Williams on their knees in front of her,” he said. Davis stayed away from rehearsals for two and a half days. Rumors circulated, correctly as it happens, that Jo Van Fleet had been sent a script.

At noon on October 27, a few days before the play was to open in Rochester—a booking made at Davis’s request, at the theater where she’d made her professional stage debut, thirty-three years earlier—Davis reappeared. Her return had been announced the previous day in a statement read to the cast, which said “that she had an
artistic
difference . . . and no mention of the incident was ever to be made to her.” On her return, Davis looked “a little red-rimmed around the eyes, slightly overweight and seemed as though she had been on some kind of toot,” Maxtone-Graham noted. “Needless to say, the producer, director, author, stage-manager, actors—everybody—had a large mouthful of humble pie, and every time Miss Davis made the most pathetic joke, there was roar upon roar of laughter. Giggles and chuckles at her slightest whim. Rather like a very badly or, rather, well-paid canned-laugh audience.”

The opening night of
Iguana
in Rochester was like “a wild comedy,” according to Corsaro. “Tennessee and I looked at each other. It was as if the people were not used to seeing live theater.” After opening night, Davis claimed to have sprained her ankle; she was forced to wait out the next day’s performance in a wheelchair (“suffering from a wrenched knee, as well as a secondary part,” as one local paper reported). “She was only good on opening night because she was nervous. Then out came the cigarettes and the strut,” Corsaro said. “She was really very disruptive at this point. She never allowed the play to take on any momentum.”

To Williams, behind her back, she was “La Davis”; to the cast she was “Jessica Dragonet” and “Lydea Leadflipper,” and to Corsaro she was “La Bête.” “She was asking for rewrites, rewrites all the time. There were no rewrites. Tennessee gave her dribbles,” said Corsaro, who within a fortnight held a secret cast meeting to discuss replacing her. “I’m sorry to have to agree with that,” Leighton said at the meeting. “But I don’t think she’s doing any service to the play.” However, the one service that Davis provided—advance ticket sales—made it almost impossible to confront her, let alone fire her. She was the star—an economic fact of life that Davis would periodically underline to the company by refusing to perform a matinee while one of her assistants stood inside the box office to tally the number of people asking for their money back.

The tour quickly became a battlefield, “perfidy galore,” as Corsaro called it. Even the stage manager got into the rancorous spirit of things. “I can’t help feeling that Chuck Bowden and Frank Corsaro, all these people, as they listen to Tennessee, perhaps feel at the back of their minds that here is a rather drunken old reprobate telling them what to do with his play,” Maxtone-Graham remarked. As the troupe rolled into Detroit, where Davis was photographed on crutches while getting out of the limousine that had carried her all the way from Rochester—“IGUANA LIMPS INTO DETROIT,” read one newspaper headline—chaos ruled. Davis was fighting with O’Neal, Leighton, and the management; Corsaro was fighting Bowden’s increasingly intrusive suggestions; and Williams was fighting with Merlo, whom he had managed to cajole into accompanying him on the road. In addition to the personal wars being waged, an artistic Rubicon remained to be crossed: the length of the play had to be dealt with; the curtain was coming down at 11:30. “Overlong, dreadfully overlong,” Maxtone-Graham said. “I think they must cut twenty-five minutes.” But Williams wouldn’t, or couldn’t, cut. The obvious place for cuts was in Davis’s part; if he tampered with her role, she would walk out.

While trying to box clever with Davis, Williams was already dazed by harrowing bouts with Merlo, which made it almost impossible for him to concentrate on the professional task at hand. “Frank is not a bad boy,” Williams had written Wood. “In certain ways, his devotion to our pets, his devotion to the outcasts of society, the whores of Rome, the beatniks of New York, the cracked or cracking up ‘lost ones’ in Key West, even the chronic jail-birds and the heroin-addicts, is a bit like Saint Francis of Assisi who embraced the leper in the woods who cried ‘Unclean!’ ” Merlo, who couldn’t resist the desperate and the wounded, couldn’t say no to Williams.

But Merlo, too, was ailing. He “really didn’t feel well,” Paula Laurence, who was understudying Davis, recalled. “He used to walk the streets at night because he felt so poorly and didn’t want to upset Tennessee.” Williams, however, misconstrued Merlo’s late-night absences as rejection; “It’s over between us!” he bleated repeatedly to Corsaro in Detroit. Feeling the need for devoted attention, Williams had their black Belgian shepherd, Satan, acquired in Rome at Anna Magnani’s urging, shipped up from Key West. “He is a handy thing to have around when you are entertaining strangers whose kindness you aren’t quite sure of,” Williams wrote to Oliver Evans, with an admission that he was “a little scared of him myself.” (The previous summer, Satan had put a bite that required seven stitches in Marion Vaccaro’s hand.) Satan was good company at first. “He used to sit in front of me at the Book-Cadillac Hotel in Detroit, staring into my eyes with those lovely yellow eyes of his, and occasionally sticking out his tongue to give my hand a lick,” Williams recalled.

But one morning, after his stint at the typewriter, Williams went into the bedroom and stepped over Satan, who lay “like a guardian by the twin bed of Frankie.” As Williams slid into Merlo’s bed, Satan growled his displeasure. That night, the dog savaged Williams in his own bed and bit both his ankles to the bone. “He was starting for my throat when Frankie rushed out and pulled him off me,” he said. Merlo had the dog put down the next day. A week later, after his ankles, he claimed, “had swollen up almost to the size of an elephant’s,” Williams was hospitalized. He was under heavy sedation, but there was no way to calm his rampaging paranoia: Merlo had set Satan on him; Merlo wanted him dead; Merlo wanted his money.

Bette Davis and Patrick O’Neal in
The Night of the Iguana

After his release from the hospital and the transfer of the show to Chicago, Williams continued to fear for his life. Bowden and Laurence successfully arranged for him to attend a private mass at six in the morning, to pray for the troubled production and himself—they chose the early hour in order to evade the
Time
photographers, who, Williams imagined, had staked out the hotel for the cover story they were writing on him. Out of gratitude, Williams insisted on taking the Bowdens out to a Chinese meal. That evening, he was sitting with them in his suite. “I’ll have a drink and then we’ll have that banquet,” he said, adding to Bowden, “Open a new bottle.” “So I opened a new bottle of vodka,” Bowden recalled. “By that time, Frankie had gone out. I said, ‘Tennessee, what is this about opening a new bottle? There’s a new bottle over there, just one drink is out.’ He said, ‘Frankie’s putting ground glass in the bottles. He’s trying to poison me.’ ”

Williams’s delusional outbursts were too much for Merlo, who decamped to Key West, leaving the playwright to his own demented devices. “Frankie had dealt so well with [Tennessee’s] paranoia,” Maureen Stapleton said. “The craziness began with those awful crazy pills he was getting.” (A microbiologist, writing about Williams’s gargantuan intake of drugs, called it “a pharmacology of the lost.”) The pills, in this case, included barbiturates and “fire-shots”—injections that could include amphetamines, pain-killers, vitamins, and human placenta—doled out by Dr. Max Jacobson, a purveyor of speed to the rich and famous whose nickname was “Dr. Feelgood.” “I hope to get through this final Broadway production, Iguana, and I think I will need someone like Max Jacobson to help me make it,” Williams had written to his editor at New Directions six months earlier. Williams joined a long list of high-rolling recipients of Jacobson’s shots: Marlene Dietrich, Alan Jay Lerner, Truman Capote, Nelson Rockefeller, and John F. Kennedy, among them. “I don’t care if it’s horse piss—it works,” President Kennedy said. It also caused symptoms that resembled those of paranoid schizophrenia: wild mood swings, hyperactivity, impaired judgment, and, in the case of the amphetamine-poisoned presidential photographer Mark Shaw, death—a result that contributed to the revocation of Jacobson’s medical license in 1975.