Quote of the Day (Tennessee Williams, on the Human Heart)

“What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains.” — Blanche DuBois to suitor Harold “Mitch” Mitchell in American playwright and fiction writer Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)

The image accompanying this post comes from the 1951 film adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama by Tennessee Williams, with Vivien Leigh as Blanche and Karl Malden as Mitch. Both won Oscars for their performances.

Quote of the Day (Laurence Olivier, on Vivien Leigh)

“I started to rehearse Streetcar on 29 August 1949. I think I can say that I was helpful to Vivien’s performance of Blanche; I hit on the practical notion that as by changing one feature one can create a whole new face, so by the alteration of one major characteristic, not hitherto associated with you, you can become another person with a different personality. I noticed at the first rehearsals, by the reactions among the company, that Vivien's unexpected, much deeper, much rougher voice had impressed them. I watched, fascinated, the strange new person that grew from this one dominant change of key. I thought, if her critics had one grain of fairness, they will give her credit for being an actress and not go on forever letting their judgment be distorted by her great beauty and Hollywood stardom. As it turned out, they were not so bad as usual, but clearly reluctant in their approval. Her colleagues and the public were unanimously eulogistic in their praises.”—Laurence Olivier, describing directing wife Vivien Leigh in a London production of A Streetcar Named Desire, in Confessions of an Actor: An Autobiography (1982)

This passage speaks volumes about the relationship between Sir Laurence Olivier and the second and most famous of his three wives, Vivien Leigh, born on this date 100 years ago in India. You see the loving protectiveness that sustained him through two decades of marriage to a woman he correctly described to later lover Sarah Miles as “a manic depressive, schizophrenic, nymphomaniac”; admiration for a fellow actor’s skill; an emphasis on how external characteristics, rather than the dredging up of personal experience, informs a role; and, perhaps, at least some competiveness between the two (he was “helpful” to the performance of an actress who, he also told Miles, “wasn’t good enough in the theatre [to be designated by the queen as ‘Dame’]. She would never even bother turning up for her voice production classes.”).

Streetcar came halfway through one of the most storied—and sad—marriages in film history. (For the denouement, see my prior post on the making of The Prince and the Showgirl, set against the background of their crumbling relationship.)

The “Hollywood stardom” to which Olivier referred came to Leigh as a result, of course, of Gone With the Wind. She wasn’t exactly right for the role of the Southern belle to beat all Southern belles (the novel’s first sentence, after all, is, “Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were"). But with her kind of looks onscreen (in the words of friend Jesse L. Lasky Jr., “hair stirred by the breeze, eyes like fire opals beneath the circle of her wide-brimmed black hat”), who would dare quibble? So she won the role, after the most publicized talent search in movie history, along with her first Oscar.

The dominant characteristic of Scarlett is her indomitability in the face of catastrophes that crush nearly everyone else near and dear to her. Leigh made only nine more feature films after Gone With the Wind and, with the exception of the younger, spirited half of Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), none of the roles reflect Scarlett’s strength.

Her London triumph as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, along with her central part in the greatest Hollywood blockbuster of them all in GWTW, gave her the leverage to win the role in the film adaptation from the actress who originated Blanche on Broadway, Jessica Tandy, and to take home her second Oscar in 1951. 

But this film, like others in these years, mirrored her offscreen stormy love life and fragile mental condition. (Like Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning stint as the Joker in The Dark Knight, it raises the issue of how far an actor with mental-health issues can go in exploring a dark role.)

The role of Blanche--fearful of losing youth and beauty--has to be among the most harrowing an actress can play. Ten years later, another Tennessee Williams property would expose, even more pitilessly, Leigh’s insecurity: The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, about an aging actress who takes up with a young Italian gigolo.(Again, art seemed to mirror life: Leigh had an affair with her miscast co-star: Warren Beatty, already establishing a reputation as a lothario.)

A couple of years later, Miles, who had some unhappy experiences with Leigh during the shooting of the film, met the actress again. It soon became apparent that Leigh did not have a clue about her misbehavior to the younger woman, and she apologized. At that point, Miles notes with pity, in a recent article in The Daily Mail, she glimpsed a “ravishing beauty now ravaged by life.”

This Day in Theater History (Brando Rides Williams’ ‘Streetcar’ to Fame)

December 3, 1947—When A Streetcar Named Desire opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, it did more than thrust Tennessee Williams to the front of a new generation of American playwrights, or confirm Elia Kazan as the most important theater director of his generation. 

In Marlon Brando, Broadway discovered the exemplar of the new, more naturalistic "Method" style of acting.

When the 23-year-old actor made his way up to Cape Cod, Mass., where Williams was staying, to audition for his career-making role as Stanley Kowalski, he had to his credit only three small, albeit scene-stealing, Broadway credits, in I Remember Mama, Truckline Café and Candida. 

But when Williams saw the actor (who fixed the plumbing and wiring at Williams’ house before he sat down to read for the role), he knew instantly that he had found the embodiment of the coarse but sexually charged brother-in-law of Blanche DuBois.

That latter quality—sexuality—is essential to the role. But amazingly, at least one production I saw forgot that. 

In 2005, the Roundabout Theatre Co. cast John C. Reilly as Stanley. (I wholeheartedly agree with Ben Brantley’s dismissal of this mistake: “Imagine Karl Malden playing Ralph Kramden in ‘The Honeymooners.’")

Let's be kind and grant, though, that greater minds than those at the Roundabout missed why Stanley's animal magnetism--which, of course, not only leads wife Stella to stay with him but, at the end, to distrust Blanche's account of his rape of her--is so important. After a tryout of the play in New Haven, playwright Thornton Wilder was asked for his opinion of the show. 

"It was like having a papal audience," Williams remembered in his memoir. "We all sat about this academic gentleman while he put the play down as if delivering a papal bull. He said that it was based upon a fatally mistaken premise. No female who had ever been a lady (he was referring to Stella) could possibly marry a vulgarian such as Stanley."

     

The earthy Williams immediately thought that the older playwright had never known the kind of experience that Stanley provided Stella.

  

One fascinating instance of alternative casting at the time of the original production would have come closer to Williams’ intent, at least. 

Irene Mayer Selznick, in her Broadway debut as a producer, wanted some box-office insurance, and pushed for John Garfield as Stanley. She undoubtedly remembered his role opposite Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice when she thought of the erotic heat he might generate. 

Moreover, the actor, at 33, was closer than Brando to Stanley’s age as conceived by Williams, and as a fellow member of New York’s legendary Group Theater with Kazan, he would have shared a kind of shorthand with the director.

But the film star’s insistence on non-negotiable items (e.g., more lines and a short time commitment) led Selznick, Kazan and Williams to look elsewhere. That led to an opening for Brando, and an opportunity to showcase the "Method style" of acting then beginning to gain traction in New York at the newly formed Actors Studio. 

Originally formulated by Russia's Konstantin Stanislavski, then promulgated by Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler and Elia Kazan at the Actors Studio, "The Method" called for actors to internalize the experience of the characters they portrayed.

What might that original Streetcar have looked like? The closest facsimile is, of course, Kazan’s translation of the play into his 1951 film, which not only had him at the helm but also three of the original quartet of principal roles—Brando, Kim Hunter as Stella, and Karl Malden as Mitch. 

The one difference, though, was an essential one: Vivien Leigh rather than Jessica Tandy as Blanche.

Kazan would have had no problem eliciting tension between his two film co-stars to mirror that between Blanche and Stanley. 

As production began, Brando grew annoyed at Leigh’s fussiness, and felt frustrated, in a Stanley-like way, by her charms. He admitted to friends that he wanted to sleep with Leigh so badly that his teeth hurt, but couldn’t do so because of the on-set presence of her husband, Laurence Olivier.

In the case of the Tandy-Brando relationship, Kazan had to work harder. While guiding and prodding Brando, his student at the newly formed Actors Studio, at every turn, he offered Tandy virtually no tips on how to approach her role. Maybe he figured the 38-year-old English actress was an old pro and would figure it out.

(On the other hand, it wouldn’t have been beyond him to artificially create an adversarial relationship between his stars. Five years later, on the set of Viva Zapata!, he approached Brando and Anthony Quinn separately, telling each how much the other actor loathed him. When it came time for their climatic fight, the realism was something to behold.)

Brando’s unconstrained sexuality (onstage, he drew constant attention to his lips by constantly chewing gum, swilling from a beer bottle, or smoking a cigar) allowed Williams to begin to develop one of the central motifs of his career: the stud as destroyer. “We’ve had this date from the beginning,” Stanley leers as he begins to rape Blanche. 

The character represented the last step in the downward spiral begun by her sexual adventurousness—a trait that lost her a job as a schoolteacher for seducing a student. 

The equation—Eros equals death, or at least psychic obliteration—would be repeated in the novella and film The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (again starring Leigh) and The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore.

Streetcar marked the point when Williams was still in most control of his material and his life. With a 30-minute standing ovation at the conclusion of the show at the Barrymore, not to mention the first of his two Pulitzers, the play brought the playwright to an emotional high. 

For Brando, it marked the point when he rewrote the rules for stage acting. Then he decamped for Hollywood, where he could use his skills before millions more, and for millions of dollars more—all the time relying on his improvisational skills and cue cards to cloak his rebellious refusal to learn lines.

Broadway lost something when he left, but so, it turned out, did the star.

(The photo of Marlon Brando, taken by Carl Van Vechten in 1948, while the actor was still in Streetcar, is now part of the Van Vechten Collection in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress.)

Flashback, August 1956: “Prince” Party Marks Apex of Olivier, Rattigan

Terence Rattigan loved the good life, and he proceeded to celebrate it again with a grand soiree at his country estate in Sunnydale, England, close to where his screenplay for The Prince and the Showgirl was being filmed. Anyone seeing the host—not only the creator of hits on Broadway and the West End, but also reputedly the highest-paid screenwriter in the world—together with the male star of the movie, Laurence Olivier, could be forgiven for thinking they were on top of the world.

But already, both men sensed that, beneath the placid surface of their lives, dangers lurked, and that they would never have it so good again. Their problems involved two women—both connected to this particular film property—and an up-and-coming playwright-screenwriter.

Two Women--Both Trouble

One of the two women was Olivier’s wife, actress Vivien Leigh, who had originated the role of “the showgirl” in the original stage version of the film (then titled The Sleeping Prince). The play, Rattigan didn’t mind admitting, was a trifle, a confection whipped up the year that Elizabeth II was crowned queen, when the whole island was even more absorbed in all things royal than ever before.

British critics and audiences weren’t exactly wild about it, either, leading Rattigan’s good friend Noel Coward to offer some tongue-in-cheek consolation: ““Don’t worry, Terence. I not only f--- up some of my plays by writing them, but I frequently f--- them up by acting in them as well.”

Rattigan, then, was thrilled when this unlikely property drew interest from an even more unlikely source: Marilyn Monroe, whose ambition was to act in a film with Olivier.

At first, Olivier was thrilled about working with Monroe, too. Upon first meeting her, he wrote about how he would break the news to Leigh if he went ahead with his idle fantasy of an affair with the blonde bombshell. He thought she was sweet, enchanting. But not for long.

You have to love the accompanying photo of Monroe surrounded by Olivier and Leigh. First of all, it is so staged. You can tell that the three principals--all acutely aware of how they looked on camera--must have sensed how this shot would look like once it was snapped. But more important, as consummate actors, they’re expressing an affection for each other that they didn’t feel in life, except maybe fleetingly.

Within only a week or two, the actor-knight was fuming over the actress’ chronic tardiness, her inability to get through scenes quickly, and the excessive influence of her adviser Paula Strasberg, wife of Actors’ Studio coach Lee Strasberg. For her part, Monroe suspected—probably correctly—that her director-star wanted her in this role less for her acting skills than her proven box-office ability.

Soaking all this up, with some humor but also with an insecurity to match Monroe’s own, was Leigh. It would have been out of the question for the Oscar-winning star of Gone With the Wind and A Streetcar Named Desire to repeat her stage performance on screen. While the fortysomething Leigh could have gotten away with being a showgirl onstage, the big screen, with its often giant, pitiless closeups, would have exposed the evidence of the years starting to show on her still-beautiful face.

Early in the filming, then, when Leigh inquired of Olivier’s assistant Colin Clark how the movie was progressing, she smiled, with a touch of minx, when he told her that it really wasn’t going well at all.

Olivier must not have believed his horrible fortune. If he had thought he was getting a respite from one mentally unstable woman--his wife (more on this in a minute)--he was badly mistaken. A quarter-century later, in his memoir Confessions of an Actor, he acknowledged that, when all was said and done, Monroe had given “a star performance,” observing particularly that “no one had such a look of hurt innocence or of unconscious wisdom.”

Middle-Aged Angst

Even that recollection, however, was tinged with lingering difficult memories of the filming, as well as what was occurring in his personal life. “I was fifty. What a happy memory it would have been if Marilyn had made me feel twenty years younger--but I was upset by her insolence, which showed my age, I suppose….Maybe I was tetchy with Marilyn and with myself, because my career was in a rut.”

Even though Monroe, like Olivier, showed up at Rattigan’s party, the soiree gave the director a few hours to forget about his middle-aged angst. Rattigan, too, was able to forget momentarily the sense that his own career and life had slipped out of gear and he might not be able to get back on track.

Ever since the spring, when John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger had electrified the London theater world, Rattigan had worriedly taken in the critical hosannas that erupted over this drama of working-class alienation and towering fury, realizing that his own brand of theater--in which somewhat more genteel characters struggle against misfortune and shame with barely repressed despair--was no longer in favor. He feared, with reason, that his heyday was over.

Coward, a mutual friend of Rattigan and the Oliviers, felt the same fears about his future place in the British theater that afflicted his playwright confidante. But at least in early summer, Coward thought he could stave off public disaffection for awhile with a box-office success: Ms. Leigh in his new play, South Sea Bubble.

“Filled With Forebodings”

Coward’s confidence evaporated when Leigh announced to the press on July 12 that she was expecting a child by Christmas. While cabling his congratulations to her and Olivier, the playwright confided to his diary his considerable annoyance about replacing his star --and his enormously perceptive take on what the pregnancy might mean for her:

“I also think, from Vivien’s point of view, that it is a highly perilous enterprise. If anything goes wrong it will very possibly send her around the bend again; she is over forty, very, very small, and none too well balanced mentally. I am filled with forebodings and a curious sense of having been let down.”

Coward was right to feel unease. He had been privy to much of the couple’s agony earlier in the decade, as, during a U.S. appearance in the “two Cleos” (Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra), Leigh began to show stronger and more frequent symptoms of manic depression. A further strain had developed between husband and wife over her affair with co-star Peter Finch on the set of the 1954 film Elephant Walk. Her nervous breakdown on location required that she be replaced by Elizabeth Taylor.

At this point, another consideration comes into play: Was Leigh really pregnant? The possibility that she might not have been was raised by Donald Spoto in his 1992 biography of Olivier:

“Still slim, no one could have guessed that she was four months pregnant, and no medical records confirming her testimony have been uncovered. In view of Marilyn Monroe’s imminent arrival and assumption of Vivien’s role, there was widespread speculation that the pregnancy was a deception designed by Vivien to maintain a hold on Olivier’s attention.”

But Spoto’s footnotes on this reveal no sources about any of this. In contrast, in his biography of Olivier, Terry Coleman includes the testimony of Olivier’s sister-in-law Hester Ives St. John, who vividly recalled the devastating denouement: a middle-of-the-night call from Leigh’s GP to a gynecologist, who, after examining the star, said: “I’m sorry, we couldn’t save it. It was a girl.”

Curtains on One Marriage and Three Lives

Leigh was devastated by the miscarriage. By Christmastime, instead of celebrating the birth of the first child of their 16-year union, she and Olivier were quarreling. Matters worsened during Olivier’s appearance in Osborne’s The Entertainer, when the actor, already so worn by his demanding role as has-been vaudevillian Archie Rice that he needed rejuvenation injections, was subjected to humiliating fights in front of cast and crew by Leigh.

By 1958, after Olivier had begun an affair with Joan Plowright, who played his daughter in Osborne’s drama, the marriage of Britain’s most famous theatrical couple existed in name only.

Olivier divorced Leigh and married Plowright in 1960. Marriage to the younger woman gave him the stability and family he couldn’t have with Leigh. As for Leigh, though she embarked on a new long-term relationship, she continued to think of herself as Lady Olivier.

When Leigh died in London in 1967 from tuberculosis, Olivier, notified of her death, discharged himself from the hospital where he had been recuperating from surgery for prostate cancer, entered her flat through a side door to avoid the waiting press, then stood alone at her bedside, praying for forgiveness, he later wrote, “for all the evils that sprung up between us.”

As for Rattigan, he was nominated for a Best Screenplay Oscar for adapting his own Separate Tables in 1958, but otherwise he fell into the irrelevance that he feared would come to pass. For 10 years, it has been said, he couldn’t enter his favorite London club because he couldn’t bear the awkwardness shown by other members over his lack of a West End hit.

As I wrote earlier this year, it was only shortly before his death in 1977 that the tide began to shift somewhat in Rattigan’s favor--and a more sustained comeback is occurring this year, in the centennial of his birth.

A Story Retold on Screen

Later this year, the months of anticipation and agony surrounding The Prince and the Showgirl will be reenacted onscreen in My Week With Marilyn, a biopic based on a memoir by Colin Clark.
The new movie by Simon Curtis, which will premiere in another month at the New York Film Festival, contains a cast that looks well-matched to its real-life originals. Michelle Williams, though more petite than Monroe, seems very capable of capturing her vulnerability. Playing what might be her most interesting role in years--Vivien Leigh--will be Julia Ormond.

But the closest match of star to subject in the film might be Kenneth Branagh as Olivier. Like Olivier, Branagh is an actor-director who won considerable acclaim on stage and screen for his adaptations of Shakespeare, later fell into something of a middle-aged funk, and was once considered, with former wife Emma Thompson, as a successor to Olivier and Leigh as Britain’s royal thespian couple. He is, then, extremely knowledgeable about the stresses placed on career and marriage by enormous fame.

Oddly enough, I don't see among the cast members anyone who will be playing Rattigan. In one way, though, I'm not surprised. As William Holden's sardonic screenwriter-gigolo, Joe Gillis, noted acidly in Sunset Boulevard: "Audiences don't know somebody sits down and writes a picture; they think the actors make it up as they go along."