Tennessee Williams: Women Who Influenced THE GLASS MENAGERIE

 

I’m amused when I’m sent things that purport to analyze and explain my plays, and they are almost always centered on theatrical antecedents. It is assumed, by a number of smart people, that Brecht was my primary influence in the writing of Menagerie. I was more influenced by Clarence Brown than by Brecht, but this type of analysis gives people something to do. I think this scholarly research is a variant on my mother, my sister, and me revising movies in the house and the backyard. I told this to Gore [Vidal] and he said “Yes, but you and your mother were only disturbing the squirrels, some nosy neighbors, and your psyche. Academics disturb everything.”

 Do you agree?

     I don’t think about it.

Miriam Hopkins

What are some of the films that influenced Menagerie?

     Well, Amanda is certainly a repository of mannerisms and methods belonging to my mother—Edwina—but I was thinking of a number of women—actresses—when I cobbled her together. There is a great deal of Miriam Hopkins in Amanda, and it troubles me that so many people are no longer aware of her. If they know her at all, it is as the butt of many jokes made at her expense by Bette Davis and her fans, but Miriam was a remarkable actress and a great character, wild and funny and smart. She was very Southern, in that she was determined to always be pretty and useful and funny and necessary. I knew a lot of women who were like Miriam Hopkins or wanted very much to be Miriam Hopkins when I was growing up. She burned brightly and quickly; she was afraid she might miss things, so she flitted about. I spent a number of years obsessed with Miriam Hopkins. I carried her in my heart and in my memory. I would see her on streets and imagine her in particular situations. She occupied, for brief moments of time, the forms of Blanche and Amanda and then became what became Lady Torrance. I loved her. Difficult? I guess so. Not with me. She was every Southern divinity you could imagine. Smart and funny and elegant, and I kept looking for her in Joanne [Woodward], and Carrie Nye and Diane Ladd, but there was no one like her. No one. I will hear nothing bad of Miriam Hopkins. So Miriam got caught up in the recipe that is Amanda. I was also thinking of a particular quickness—a changing of the masks—that one saw in the work of Ruth Chatterton. Chatterton could very quickly alter her face to convey a series of emotions, and you could chart the survival of the women she was playing. It was like a shuffling of psychic cards across her face. Wonderful, wonderful actress. When she began to work in talking pictures, she was able to do the same thing with her voice—shifting, altering, hiding, flaunting. I needed some of that for Amanda, particularly when she is speaking to anyone outside of the hive she shares with Tom and Laura. There’s Fay Bainter in Amanda—and Fay toured quite successfully in Menagerie, perhaps unknowingly stepping into some of her own skin. But I took these various women and I placed them on a solid foundation from which they could operate, and that was Ida Lupino in a film called The Hard Way, which bears very little resemblance to Menagerie, but Lupino plays a scrappy, tough, manipulative woman who will do anything to get her kid sister into better situations—and to find for herself an identity and an annuity. I remember the grimy town and the grimy home in which the characters lived, and I began to imagine the oilcloth and soiled damask of the tenement in St. Louis in which Amanda would navigate and dream and plan and pine. So it was The Hard Way that I slipped beneath these women—a plate upon which to serve them up, so to speak.

Ruth Chatterton

Fay Bainter

Ida Lupino in The Hard Way (1943)