Howelings

By Mark Howell

Undone on Stage and Screen

 

Long before Tennessee Williams moved to Key West to live and write, he’d established a working relationship with Elia Kazan, already established as a successful Broadway stage director and soon to become one of Hollywood’s most highly regarded film directors.

It was Kazan who brought “A Streetcar Named Desire” to the screen in 1951, following his hit stage production of Williams’ finest play. The movie starred Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden (all members of his original Broadway cast) plus Vivien Leigh, who’d appeared in the London theatre production and was brought in for the film version in lieu of Jessica Tandy, who’d created the part of Blanche DuBois on Broadway.

Williams and Kazan would eventually fall out over a fierce quarrel regarding the third act of the stage production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” in which the character of Brick tells Maggie, “How in hell on earth do you imagine you’re going to have a child by a man that can’t stand you?” which Williams understood as a flag that Brick was, in fact, gay, but Kazan understood not at all.

And so began a kind of decline in Williams that was marked by a fierce dependence on mind alteration, described by John Lahr, America’s leading theater critic, in a new biography, “Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh.”

“His working day went like this. He put on a bathrobe, then had two cups of strong coffee followed by other pick-me-ups: First a pill or two and then, during one extended period when Williams veered suicidally close to the rocks, he also gave himself an intramuscular injection of a magic potion concocted by a New York doctor called Max Jacobson, referred to by celebrities who had his phone number — Marlene Dietrich, Nelson Rockefeller, John F. Kennedy — as Dr. Feelgood.” Lahr identifies the ingredients as amphetamines, painkillers, vitamins and human placenta and quotes Williams as telling Kazan that, cranked up to racing speed, he then backed down the rpms before starting work by making himself a double martini, about which Lahr comments that “when a man makes himself a double martini before dressing he is not using a graduated beaker to get the measure right.” (Williams would eventually die from choking on the swallowed top of a pill bottle.)

What happened to Kazan, following his film of “Streetcar,” is quite a different matter. He chose to appear before the he House Committee on Un-American Activities and name the names of those in Hollywood he had reason to suspect were communists. Born in Istanbul to Greek parents, “Gadge” as he was popularly known (although not so much after his appearance before HUAC) claimed to his dying day in 1960 that he was constitutionally opposed to communism and had done the “least painful thing.” To help explain this point of view, he directed “On the Waterfront” starring Marlon (“I coulda been a contender”) Brando, in which his character makes a radical but heroic decision to fink on corruption within the stevedore union.

 

*****

Undone in Connecticut:

Here are directions to the offices of the Department of Motor Vehicles in Waterford as printed by the DOT itself:

“Traveling I-84 East, take exit 55 (Route 2E). Follow Route 2 to exit 19 (Route 11). Follow Route 11 until it ends; then turn left on Route 82. About a quarter mile down, take a right on Route 85. Follow Route 85 until it goes under the I-395 overpass; then stay in the right lane. Travel half a mile down Route 85, take a right on Cross Street at a light (large intersection, a dirt hill will be on the left). Follow Cross Street until you pass the on-ramps for I-95. The next intersection (with a light) is Route 1 (there are no signs for Route 1; you come down a small hill to the intersection and the road goes up a small hill on the other side). Turn left on Route 1 and follow it for about two to three miles. Stay to the left. The Stop & Shop Plaza will be two lights down on the left, but you need to turn left on Clark Lane before the plaza (entrance to the plaza is right off Clark Lane).”

And there you are!

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