Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh Read Online Free PDF Page B

into semipermanent theatrical retirement in Hollywood. In the public mind, Odets had replaced Eugene O’Neill as the great American dramatist. By the time the Group began mounting Odets’s plays, O’Neill himself, disdaining Broadway’s “show shop,” had retired from commercial theater to work on a nine-play cycle. (He finished only two.) Although Williams was pessimistic about his chances in the contemporary commercial theater—“What can we produce from the tall silk hat of our esoteric fancy to cast a spell upon this sweating rabble?” Williams wrote to his friend Paul Bigelow—he arrived on the scene just at the time everything in American life, including the stage, was about to change.
    “We were deceived by the maturity of the play into misjudging the immaturity of the author,” the director Margaret Webster said. Williams later admitted as much. “Probably no man has ever written for the theatre with less foreknowledge of it,” he wrote. He had no experience with casting, interfering producers, petulant actors, backstage politics, or, crucially, rewriting under pressure.
Battle of Angels
was written “before I knew what a proscenium arch was,” Williams said. The Guild, however, was planning a four-star production. The play was submitted to Joan Crawford, who thought it “low and common”; to Tallulah Bankhead (“It’s impossible, darling,” she told Williams); and, finally, to Miriam Hopkins, a talented but temperamental film star looking to revive her flagging career. Hopkins was tempted to star and, in order to have more control over the final product, to invest in the show. “HOPKINS MAY PLAY HILLBILLY’S ‘ANGELS,’ ”
Variety
announced in its October 30 issue.
    The play was set to open in Boston, a famously puritanical community. To Williams’s agent, Audrey Wood, the decision signaled “a deep collective death wish.” The producers also chose an opening night that clashed with the first night of
Lady in the Dark
, the musical collaboration of Moss Hart, Ira Gershwin, and Kurt Weill, starring Gertrude Lawrence. The first-string critics would inevitably cover the all-star production, leaving the rest—“a bunch of prissy old maids,” according to Williams—for
Battle of Angels
.
    To his first meeting with Miriam Hopkins, over a champagne supper at her elegant apartment in the Ambassador Hotel in New York, Williams wore a corduroy jacket and riding boots, which he cavalierly propped up on her yellow satin chaise longue. Hopkins, he wrote to his family, “raised the roof about her part in the play.” He added, “I think she wants to do a solo performance.” For most of the meeting, according to Webster, who was also present, Williams didn’t “seem much interested; once, when Miriam became a little vehement, he prefaced his reply with ‘As far as I can gather from all this hysteria,’ ” Webster recalled, adding, “This is known in the language of
Variety
as ‘a stoperoo.’ ” However, it didn’t stop Hopkins from jumping up, at one point, and shrieking, “ ‘I am old, I am tired, I am getting lines under my eyes!’ ” Williams, who admired Hopkins’s beauty and intelligence onstage, judged her “the most temperamental person I have ever met, a regular hellion.”
    By the time
Battle of Angels
opened, Hopkins had lived up to Williams’s judgment. She had fired three different Vals. Seriously concerned about the script, toward the end of the rehearsals she protested to Williams, “For heaven’s sake, do something, something!” “How it wrung my heart that I could do nothing for her,” Williams wrote. “She had staked so much on this play. It was to mark her triumphal return to the stage, where her talent as a dramatic actress could operate without the bonds that bad screen vehicles had recently put on her. . . . Oh, if only my head would clear up a little—if I could only find some lucid interval in this dervish frenzy that was sweeping us all