Tennessee Williams: Never Talk To An Actress

In a state of sobriety, I have always been more or less guarded or diffident in my relations with actresses: that is, with the exceptions of Laurette Taylor, who wouldn't tolerate diffidence in a playwright, and the great and dazzling and sometimes wrathful Tallulah Bankhead, whom I think it is appropriate to mention in the same breath with Laurette.

Laurette Taylor in The Glass Menagerie.

Let me tell you, at times a little obliquely, about encounters that were somewhat dismaying.

I recall how an actress of great talent and prestige summoned the director and me into her dressing room a short while before the play was to open on Broadway. We naturally obeyed the summons, and there she sat among her bushels of roses.

"At this point in an out-of-town tour," she told us, "I can always tell if a play is going to be well or poorly received in New York."

I assumed, innocently, that there was to be some reassuring pronouncement from the lady, but that was the way in which it didn't work out. After some breathlessly suspended moments of silence, she shook her head at us in negation of any hope for the play.

On other occasions it has been I that could be called the spokesman for the party of doom, which is a large and influential party.

Once, when (the incomparable) Mr. Kazan was directing one of my plays, I became panicky over the (irresistible) charm of the leading lady who was supposed to be portraying an unsympathetic part. To my astonishment, a loud and stricken voice rose from me.

"What is she doing? I didn't write this part for an ingenue."

The actress burst into tears and disappeared into the peripheral gloom of the New Amsterdam rehearsal hall. Mr. Kazan followed her and, after 15 minutes of his silken whispers, the actress returned to the rehearsal stage.

Mr. Kazan said to me: "Tennessee, you must never talk to an actress."

Panic sometimes overtakes me at the first reading of a new play. This happened at the first (reading) rehearsal of "Sweet Bird of Youth." When the reading had gotten into the second act of the play, I said to Mr. Kazan, "Gadg, I'd like to speak to you a moment."

"O.K."

He came down and sat next to me in the auditorium. I said to him: "Gadg, we've got to stop this thing right here, it mustn't go any further."

I believe he told me to go home and rest. In the evening he and his wife, Molly, came to my apartment and told me, persuasively, that I was just nervous because of my run-down condition, or something like that.

The rehearsals of the play were not discontinued and the play opened successfully on Broadway.

But I am supposed to be writing about my relationships with actresses. I'm sorry I got off the track.

Must silence always follow the loss of a star? In my opinion, no.

A revival of "Streetcar" was having its initial opening at the Coconut Grove, Florida, Playhouse, and the brilliant, sometimes tempestuous star was Tallulah Bankhead. The opening night audience at the Coconut Grove Playhouse was out for a good, campy time, and Tallulah sensed the prevailing attitude of her audience that night and gave them what they wanted, and what they wanted was not a delicate moth on the stage.

Tallulah Bankhead

Following the performance there was a party on the bayshore. I went to this affair and permitted myself a few drinks too many. When Tallulah and I encountered each other, she said to me: "Well, Tennessee, wasn't I the best Blanche you've ever had?"

I said: "No, Tallulah, the worst."

She didn't take that remark as a compliment. "Over that way is the bay," she told me. "Why don't you take a swim in it, straight out?"

This revival of "Streetcar" approached New York with several stops on the way. Despite my savage love for Tallulah, I didn't attend them, but the director, Herbert Machiz, told me that Tallulah worked with the strictest dedication to the inner truth of the part. What pleasure it gives me to say that she gave not an inch to the inescapable camp-followers when the revival opened in New York at the City Center!

(Could it be that Blanche is not as much a moth as she is a tigress?)

Tallulah once said to me: "You wrote all your plays for me except the one you wrote for that Italian." She may have been right about that, in a way.

I saw Diana Barrymore give a stunning performance in the part of Blanche, too. When I went backstage, afterward, her costume was soaked with perspiration, as if she had been standing in it under a shower, and when I embraced her, I was frightened because her breast was heaving with such a dangerous intensity. I whispered to her manager, "Don't you think we'd better call a doctor?"

Gallantry! Of course, I mean hers, not mine.

I'm sad to admit that I'm still a bit "cagey" with actresses, and I suppose that confession makes you smile. During the rehearsals of my play "Kingdom of Earth," I was stalking along a backstage corridor in the manner of Napoleon returning from Russia. The star, Estelle Parsons, came up alongside me and linked her arm through mine.

I said: "Oh, Estelle, actresses always hate playwrights."

"Hate?" she said, in a bewildered tone, as if it were a word in a language she didn't know.

Harry Guardino and Estelle Parsons in The Seven Descents of Myrtle, as The Kingdom of Earth was renamed.

Anne Meacham is another actress with whom I've had consistently pleasant relations. Why? Not because she is beautiful, which she is, but because there's nothing she won't say or do on a stage without any sign of embarrassment. She has a totally unconventional kind of elegance.

In spite of my unfailing humor, you see, I can only write for a tigress.

Now about Maureen Stapleton, she's something else. One evening at dinner I found myself being dull to the point of catatonic, and to remedy that condition I took a goof-ball, washed down with a martini. This gave me a strange sensation and I thought my life was in imminent peril. I had several dinner-guests who were going to Maureen's. I went along with them and told Maureen what I had done. "Well, Tennessee," she said, "you had better have a glass of mustard and water. Go in the bathroom and I'll bring you the glass."

In times since the Roman empire, vomiting is supposed to be done in private, if possible, but I asked Maureen to stay in the bathroom with me while I conducted this experiment with the emetic effect of the mustard and water. I drank it down: no vomiting. "How was it?" Maureen inquired. "Delicious!" I told her, truthfully. "Well, if it was delicious, I'd better mix you a glass of it," she said. The second glass was as delicious as the first, and there was still no emetic effect. "I think you'd better try sticking a finger way down your throat," said Maureen. I took her suggestion and then, finally, the desired action occurred.

Maureen Stapleton in the 1965 revival of The Glass Menagerie.

All this while a brilliant young actress in the living room was talking with the subdued tone of an acetylene torch attacking a block of cement. When Maureen and I returned to the front room, I said to this very gifted young actress, a good friend of mine, "Honey, you've got a terrible voice problem."

Tears! - for herself or for me or for the world and all its inhabitants.

I recalled Mr. Kazan saying to me: "Tennessee, you must never talk to an actress."

"In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel" -- Anne Meacham as the lonely wife of an artist obsessed with his work, flirts with bartender John Lee. The first Tennessee Williams play to have a premiere Off Broadway since "Garden District" (1958), it bows next Sunday at the Eastside. Donald Madden co-stars.

Anne Meacham, Lester Rawlins, and Donald Madden in In The Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, 1969.

Donald Madden, Jon Lee, and Anne Meacham in In The Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, 1969.

©  1969 by the New York Times Company