Glass Menagerie, Continued

A couple days ago, I wrote an essay about actress Laurette Taylor, whose portrayal of Amanda Wingfield in the first production of The Glass Menagerie raised the bar for actors everywhere – in her time, and still, in our own. I referenced a “dogmatic and brilliant theatre director” who had demanded that I learn about Laurette Taylor.

Beautifully, a friend of mine still in touch with this man sent him my post – and this “dogmatic brilliant man” has added a long and gorgeous comment at the bottom, about Laurette Taylor, and the other great actors of the past – theatre actors whose work was never televised, put on film, etc. The giants of our theatrical culture. Our Laurence Oliviers, our John Gielguds. Giants in a culture that does not remember them.

This “dogmatic” director was the man who headed up the highly-underpraised and under-seen production of Golden Boy I was in in Chicago – the one where William Hurt showed up one night, and we did the entire production for Hurt, and ONLY him, because nobody else came!

Anyway. I am very excited that he has read my post and added his own thoughts about the theatre tradition (or lack thereof) in this country. This man is one of the foremost experts on that tradition, nobody can touch him, in terms of his knowledge. It’s encyclopedic.

I thought I would continue on in this vein, and post another excerpt from Tom, the biography by Lyle Leverich, on the first half of Tennessee Williams’ life.

Yesterday, I posted a lengthy excerpt having to do with The Glass Menagerie opening in Chicago, in 1944.

Today, I will post excerpts having to do with the production moving, finally, to Broadway, in 1945.

Glass Menagerie, continued…

The show continues its run in Chicago. Laurette Taylor has become the toast of the town. New York bigwigs fly in to see this new extraordinary show, and to see her performance, in particular. It is unclear at first, whether or not it will move on to New York. New York is the center of the universe. “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere…” Being a huge success in Chicago was wonderful and gratifying, for this sixty-year-old actress whom everyone had given up on for years. But she knew that … Manhattan and the theatre audience and theatre critics in Manhattan were other animals altogether. Her anxiety grows.

As much as she was being lionized in Chicago and was enjoying it, Laurette knew the fawning for what it was: skittering leaves in the Windy City. Offstage now, she was becoming bored and edgy and more and more in need of a drink. Tom [Tennessee Williams] felt that what she actually needed was the seclusion of her own apartment and the protection of her young actress friend, Eloise. One who could understand Laurette’s quicksilver disposition was Helen Hayes, then in Chicago playing in Harriet. She remembered Laurette saying over and over like an incantation, ” ‘I’m going to break this witch’s curse.’ ”

Hayes said that Laurette was one of her idols and that they had been friends for a long time. “Harriet was closed on Sunday nights, and that was when I saw The Glass Menagerie. The play and Laurette were simply superb. Most nights after work, I would join her and Tennessee (they were very close) and Tony Ross, too, and we would go to their favorite bar. Laurette would order a double scotch, and when she saw my eyes widen, she reassured me that if she ordered a second drink, her deceased husband, Hartley, would come down and gently tap her on the shoulder. Being Irish, she believed that to be perfectly true.”

Hayes remembered that Laurette’s career had nose-dived and that hers was “a daring comeback attempt at age sixty … One night the phone was ringing when I returned to my suite at the Ambassador. It was Laurette. ‘I can’t go on tomorrow,’ she said in despair. ‘My throat hurts, and I’m losing my voice. If I don’t go on, everyone will think I’m drunk. If they say I’m drunk, I will get drunk and stay drunk till I die.’ Her cry for help galvanized me.” Hayes said that she always carried an electric steam kettle when she went on tour, to which she could add medicine. ‘It had been helpful when I came down with bronchitis or laryngitis. I told Laurette I would come right away with the kettle … I taxied downtown to the Sherman House. I stayed with her through most of the night, making sure she was breathing properly … the next evening she gave a magnificent performance.”

That image kills me. Helen Hayes steaming Laurette Taylor. Jesus.

The buzz around the show grew.

The word had spread to Broadway and Hollywood, and the wagers were on: Would she or would she not make it back? Everyone in the Chicago company was now, by mid-February, plainly nervous. The more Laurette was surrounded by flattery and the excitement of prominent visitors, the greater was the strain on her to keep from joining in the carouse around her. The marvelously witty and stylish actress Ina Claire was in the audience every night, and Tom wrote Audrey: “Everybody stops off here between Hollywood and New York, so our social life is terrific. We’ve had Helen Hayes, Ruth Gordon, Katherine Helpburn, Terry Helburn, Maxwell Anderson, Mary Chase, Guthrie McClintic Lindsay and Crouse, Raymond Massey, Gregory Peck, Luther Adler and God knows what all! Everybody has been favorable except Maxwell Anderson. He didn’t like it.”…

Katherine Hepburn’s enthusiasm for The Glass Menagerie, on the other hand, was such that she went straightway to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Louis B. Mayer, saying that the studio should buy the play, assign George Cukor to direct, cast her as Laura and Spencer Tracy as the gentleman caller, and, above all, to capture on film Laurette’s incomparable performance. She was to say later that Amanda Wingfield was Tennessee’s “most tenderly observed, the most accessible woman he has ever created.”

Dammit, but the project never came about, and so we will never know what Taylor’s performance actually looked like. We can only take the words of all of the people who saw it as truth.

The play finally moves to New York. They uproot from Chicago, the glorious snowy town which had put Tennessee Williams on the map, made him a star, the town that catapulted Laurette Taylor, now a 60 year old woman, back into the limelight, after 40 years.

The pressure on this company is enormous. The show is going to be done at the Playhouse Theatre.

Laurette was well aware that both her disgrace in Alice and her comeback in Outward Bound had taken place on this same Playhouse stage. Across the street was the Cort Theatre, where her career had begun in the title role of Peg O’ My Heart. She had much to look back upon, but the present confronting her was virtually unendurable. Back in her apartment, she found that her impulse was not to leave it and to seek escape in alcohol, but she also recognized this as an enemy that could bring upon her a terrible, final disagrace. In the hours before the curtain was to rise, she was under the watchful care of Eloise Sheldon, who had taken time off from her role in Harvey to be close to her.

The Glass Menagerie was scheduled to open on Saturday, March 31, Easter eve – a week after Tom’s thirty-fourth birthday … and the day before Laurette’s sixty-first. Born a few weeks before Easter and reared in the symbolism of the Christian church, Tom saw this season as a special one, and he used the passage from crucifixion to resurrection as a constant theme in his work.

And so, opening night arrives. Everyone who is anyone showed up. It was a star-studded evening. Every powerhouse in town was in the audience.

That afternoon, there had been a technical run-through and the usual chaotic dress rehearsal. Audrey wrote:

I don’t remember where the author was that last afternoon but I shan’t ever forget sitting in an unairconditioned Playhouse Theatre. There was a frenetic veiling over everything – and everybody. The actors paced nervously before the run-through began. The light technicians tinkered with never-ending light cues and most of them came out just a little bit wrong. Having played their roles for months in Chicago meant absolutely nothing. This was the day of the New York opening. This was it. I kept remembering Liebling’s remark, “You’re only as good as the night they catch you.”

Audrey recalled that when Laurette began her opening scene, she seemed under control “but after a few words in recognizable anguish she said, ‘I’m sorry, I have to leave the stage. I’m going to be sick.’ And sick she was offstage and then returned to try once more, a little whiter.” The illness continued all afternoon.

The star of the show throwing up in between scenes was not the only problem during the technical run-through. (To those of you not in the theatre, a “technical run-through”, or, in shorthand, “tech” is when you run through the whole show, focusing on getting all the technical aspects correct – music cues, light cues, costume changes. The actors have had 3 weeks of rehearsal to get their stuff down correctly, and the technical crew gets one day. “Tech”s are long and monotonous, and notoriously very tense. They are 10 hour days. At the end of the day, you do what is known as a “cue to cue”. Which is self-explanatory. You run the couple of lines before a music or a light cue, the light cue is then executed, either correctly or not correctly, and then you run it again. Or you move on, if there are no mistakes.)

So The Glass Menagerie, with its musical cues, its projections on a screen in the back, its delicate light cues, was what is known as a “tech-heavy” show. The play relies upon these cues being executed in a sensitive intuitive way – it’s PART of the show. It’s how Tennessee wrote it. David Mamet’s plays, by contrast, are pretty much: ‘Lights up. Play happens. Lights out.” Very different sensibility. And easier “techs”.

Back to the disastrous “tech” on Easter Eve, 1946.

Paul Bowles’s sensitive incidental score roared out when it should have sounded

(another quote from Audrey Wood) like circus music, away off in the distance of memory. Julie Haydon was trying to keep a stiff upper lip, but her concern for Miss Taylor was considerable. The two men, Eddie Dowling and Tony Ross, may have been scared to death, but they made a brave attempt at pretending they didn’t care a damn what day it was.

The coproducer, Louis Singer, felt his way over to my side of the otherwise dark, empty auditorium where I was crouched down in my seat. Peering at me through the darkness, he said, ‘Tell me – you are supposed to know a great deal about the theatre – is this or is it not the worst dress rehearsal you’ve ever seen in your life?’ I nodded ‘Yes.’ I was too frightened to try and open my mouth.

During the rehearsal, Randy Echols had placed a bucket in the wings and, except for the two hours that Amanda was onstage, Laurette was leaning over it. Tony Ross later said, “It seemed incredible to us that by curtain time Laurette would have the strength left to give a performance. We went home for a few hours for supper, but Eloise told me Laurette could eat nothing.”

In her dressing room, Laurette had placed in front of her a large framed photograph of her [long-deceased] husband, Harley Manners.

Now we are into the final stretch. Curtain time is moments away. The description of what followed is so moving to me that tears blur my eyes as I type it out.

Eloise had [Laurette] dressed by the time of Randy’s summons, “Curtain, Miss Taylor!” Tony Ross said that Mary Jean Copeland and Julie had to hlep her to her place onstage. “As the lights dimmed on Dowling at the end of his opening narration and began going up on the dining-room table we could hear Laurette’s voice, ‘Honey, don’t push with your fingers … And chew — chew!’ It seemed thin and uncertain. Slowly the lights came up full, and as she continued to speak, her voice gained strength. The audience didn’t recognize her at first, and by the time they did she was well into her speech, and kept on going right through the applause. They soon quieted down.” The bucket stayed int he wings, and “the few minutes she had between scenes, she was leaning over it retching horribly. There was nothing left inside her, poor thing, but onstage – good God! – what a performance she gave!”

In the final tableau of the play, with Tom departed, Amanda hovers protectively over a broken, deeply disturbed Laura, symbolizing what Tennessee Williams saw in his own mother: “Now that we cannot hear the mother’s speech, her silliness is gone and she has dignity and tragic beauty.”

At the end, the audience roared its approval. There were twenty-four curtain calls. As Laurette took her bows, tears streaked down her cheeks and she smiled somewhat tentatively while she held out the pleated frills of her worn blue party dress and curtsied. Her daughter said that she had the look of “a great ruin of a child gazing timorously upon a world she found to be infinitely pleasing.”

At length, there were shouts of “Author! Author!” Eddie Dowling came down to the edge of the stage and beckoned Tom to come forward and take his place with the company. The young man who rose from the fourth row, his hair in a crew cut, his suit button missing, looked more like a junior in college than an eminent playwright. Standing in the aisle, he turned toward the stage and made a deep bow to the actors, his posterior in full view of the audience.

From this moment on, there was no turning back for Tom Williams. His prayers and those of his mother had been answered. Now he could give Edwina [his mother] financial independence and freedom from the bondage of her unhappy marriage. To his father’s dismay, the little boy who could not put his blocks back in the box exactly as he had found them had become the artist who would rearrange them in a lasting architecture. And now there was no escape save into himself, and no place in the world he could go where he would not be known.

He had become Tennessee Williams.

I think my favorite part of that anecdote is that, in the moment he became a celebrity, in the moment Tom left Tom behind, to become Tennessee, his first act – the first thing he did – was bow to the ACTORS. Not to the audience who had been cheering for him, but to the company of actors who had made this success possible.

Now that is a class act.