"Born On A Mountain Top In TENNESSEE (Williams That Is)!"...
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1Michael_Welch
After "Stalin," after "Hope" (the new Bob Hope biography by Richard Zoglin) I picked up John Lahr's new "freewheelin' Bob Dylan" bio of the great playwright, Thomas Lanier "Tom" then "Tennessee" Williams titled "Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh," the subtitle actually taken from Williams' diary.
It strikes me that all three of whom I consider the "greatest American playwrights," Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller and Williams, write about a "repression of the spirit" that has to do with repressed and oppressed sexual sensuality -- in O'Neill and Miller by the way I detect a "tinge" of misogyny but not in Williams, the only homosexual of the three hm.
Lahr begins with the opening of Williams' first success on Broadway, "The Glass Menagerie," and then hops back and forth into young Tom's early life, his parents' warfare of sin, sex and the "answer" to enforced celibacy, "the bottle." It even appears that Williams' beloved maternal grandfather, an Episcopal priest Walter Dakin, may well have had a "penchant" for "the Greek vice" and had to pay blackmail about some "incident."
Williams' mother Edwina enforced such an anti sexual regimen on her daughter Rose (that she went mad) and delicate son (that he became a writer-exorcist of) that of course Williams became "obsessed" with sexual sensuality and his great plays are suffused with but then the plays are really about suppression of and its (often) tragic results.
Here are a couple of excerpts I found thus far that seemed especially interesting -- first the "zeitgeist" of the times:
"Within a month of the play's opening {i. e., "The Glass Menagerie"} VE day {May 8 1945} brought an end to the war in Europe and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died {on April 12}.
"Fueled by longing and loss the republic which had deferred its dreams through fifteen years of depression and five years of war assumed seemingly overnight a new momentum, a glorious and guilt ridden race for its own survival.
"Recalling this time as 'the greatest moment of collective inebriation in American history' in his novel 'American Pastoral,' Philip Roth wrote 'Sacrifice and constraint were over.... The lid was off.' In the next decade American per capita income would triple, the greatest growth of wealth in the history of western civilization.
"Inevitably, given such enormous social and economic change, the American consciousness also underwent a sort of mutation.
"'Everything was up for grabs' Arthur Miller said. 'They were all for Number One. The death of Roosevelt was a major blow to the psyche of the country. The father was dead. It meant that the axis of concentration turned violently and very quickly away from the society to the self.' He added 'It was a difference in the idea of the individual.'
"Over the next decade this cultural journey to the interior was manifested in the shift from social realism to abstract expressionism, from Marxism to Freudianism, from theatrical naturalism to Williams' 'personal lyricism.' It is not insignificant that Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman,' one of the iconic expressions of post war America, was originally titled 'The Inside of His Head.'" (pp 64-65)
And the more "personal" --
"When {Williams} finally had his first homosexual experience -- or at least the first one mentioned explicitly in his diary -- on June 11 1939, Williams reacted as he had to his first heterosexual intercourse: he vomited.
"'Rather horrible night with a picked up acquaintance Doug whose amorous advances made me sick at the stomach' he wrote. 'Purity! Oh God -- it is dangerous to have ideals!'
"A few days later...he continued in the same vein: 'I had the experience Sat. night which confused and upset me and left me with a feeling of spiritual nausea' he wrote. 'I don't fit in with the careless young extroverts of the world -- people of my own kind are so difficult to find and one is always being disillusioned and disappointed. Oh hell! I must learn to be lonely and LIKE it -- at least there is something clean about being lonely -- not cluttered up and smeared over with cheap filthy personalities who take everything out of you that is decent and give you nothing but self disgust! But oh God it's so hard.'
"On June 25 he wrote...'I seem to be my NORMAL self again -- full of neurotic fears, a sense of doom, a dreadful lifeless weight on my heart and body. Oh of course that isn't QUITE my "normal" condition!'" (p 80)
I'll return to this again as per "Stalin" eh and in the meantime comments and such anyone?!...
It strikes me that all three of whom I consider the "greatest American playwrights," Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller and Williams, write about a "repression of the spirit" that has to do with repressed and oppressed sexual sensuality -- in O'Neill and Miller by the way I detect a "tinge" of misogyny but not in Williams, the only homosexual of the three hm.
Lahr begins with the opening of Williams' first success on Broadway, "The Glass Menagerie," and then hops back and forth into young Tom's early life, his parents' warfare of sin, sex and the "answer" to enforced celibacy, "the bottle." It even appears that Williams' beloved maternal grandfather, an Episcopal priest Walter Dakin, may well have had a "penchant" for "the Greek vice" and had to pay blackmail about some "incident."
Williams' mother Edwina enforced such an anti sexual regimen on her daughter Rose (that she went mad) and delicate son (that he became a writer-exorcist of) that of course Williams became "obsessed" with sexual sensuality and his great plays are suffused with but then the plays are really about suppression of and its (often) tragic results.
Here are a couple of excerpts I found thus far that seemed especially interesting -- first the "zeitgeist" of the times:
"Within a month of the play's opening {i. e., "The Glass Menagerie"} VE day {May 8 1945} brought an end to the war in Europe and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died {on April 12}.
"Fueled by longing and loss the republic which had deferred its dreams through fifteen years of depression and five years of war assumed seemingly overnight a new momentum, a glorious and guilt ridden race for its own survival.
"Recalling this time as 'the greatest moment of collective inebriation in American history' in his novel 'American Pastoral,' Philip Roth wrote 'Sacrifice and constraint were over.... The lid was off.' In the next decade American per capita income would triple, the greatest growth of wealth in the history of western civilization.
"Inevitably, given such enormous social and economic change, the American consciousness also underwent a sort of mutation.
"'Everything was up for grabs' Arthur Miller said. 'They were all for Number One. The death of Roosevelt was a major blow to the psyche of the country. The father was dead. It meant that the axis of concentration turned violently and very quickly away from the society to the self.' He added 'It was a difference in the idea of the individual.'
"Over the next decade this cultural journey to the interior was manifested in the shift from social realism to abstract expressionism, from Marxism to Freudianism, from theatrical naturalism to Williams' 'personal lyricism.' It is not insignificant that Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman,' one of the iconic expressions of post war America, was originally titled 'The Inside of His Head.'" (pp 64-65)
And the more "personal" --
"When {Williams} finally had his first homosexual experience -- or at least the first one mentioned explicitly in his diary -- on June 11 1939, Williams reacted as he had to his first heterosexual intercourse: he vomited.
"'Rather horrible night with a picked up acquaintance Doug whose amorous advances made me sick at the stomach' he wrote. 'Purity! Oh God -- it is dangerous to have ideals!'
"A few days later...he continued in the same vein: 'I had the experience Sat. night which confused and upset me and left me with a feeling of spiritual nausea' he wrote. 'I don't fit in with the careless young extroverts of the world -- people of my own kind are so difficult to find and one is always being disillusioned and disappointed. Oh hell! I must learn to be lonely and LIKE it -- at least there is something clean about being lonely -- not cluttered up and smeared over with cheap filthy personalities who take everything out of you that is decent and give you nothing but self disgust! But oh God it's so hard.'
"On June 25 he wrote...'I seem to be my NORMAL self again -- full of neurotic fears, a sense of doom, a dreadful lifeless weight on my heart and body. Oh of course that isn't QUITE my "normal" condition!'" (p 80)
I'll return to this again as per "Stalin" eh and in the meantime comments and such anyone?!...
2Michael_Welch
A little more "Tennessee":
"Sexuality brought Williams down to earth and into life. 'What do you expect to get from this sort of life?' Stanley {Kowalski} asks Blanche {Du Bois} about her promiscuity in the first version of 'Streetcar.' 'Just life' she says.
"Sexuality also called all absolutes into question. 'The truth of the matter is that all human ideals have been hats too big for the human head' Williams wrote in his diary in 1942. 'Chivalry -- democracy -- Christianity -- the hellenic ideal of intellectual purity (the one I find most appealing {me too!}) -- all too big a hat!'" (p 95)
"In his writing Williams defended himself against {homosexual} guilt and shame by turning sexuality into a kind of theology. Even as he was embarking on his discipleship to the carnal in 1942 he intuited that the experience of war {WWII then going on} would force Americans to find a new faith beyond self sacrifice.
"'What are we doing, we people who put words together, who project our shadows on stages' he wrote to the acclaimed German director Erwin Piscator whose first playwriting seminar at the New School Williams had attended. 'But trying to create a new and solid myth -- or FAITH -- or RELIGION -- in place of the old and desiccated and FRUITLESS one of "simple endurance"?'
"The self aggrandizement that Piscator had criticized in {Williams' play} 'Battle of Angels' when he and Williams met for the second time in 1942 -- 'Mr Williams you have written a fascist play -- all of your characters are selfishly pursuing their little personal ends and aims in life with a ruthless disregard for the wrongs and sufferings of the world around them' -- was actually a portrait of Williams' 'underground devils' and of the 'naked and savage kinds of creation' required to trap them onstage.
"The 'vast hunger for life after all this death {in the war}' that Williams had predicted to William Saroyan in 1941 had taken hold; Williams invested the 'long fingers' of desire with a sense of the divine. He referred to his own sexual spree as a 'daemon,' a divinity. Williams' characters too embodied the gospel of the flesh; in the process devils became angels." (p 96)
The individual over "society" -- almost Randian, Ayn that is -- and "sex is the answer!" Rock 'n' rollian, Lawrencian (DH not "of Arabia"!), Mailerian, James Deanian, Marilyn well you get it. Anybody? Any response?...
"Sexuality brought Williams down to earth and into life. 'What do you expect to get from this sort of life?' Stanley {Kowalski} asks Blanche {Du Bois} about her promiscuity in the first version of 'Streetcar.' 'Just life' she says.
"Sexuality also called all absolutes into question. 'The truth of the matter is that all human ideals have been hats too big for the human head' Williams wrote in his diary in 1942. 'Chivalry -- democracy -- Christianity -- the hellenic ideal of intellectual purity (the one I find most appealing {me too!}) -- all too big a hat!'" (p 95)
"In his writing Williams defended himself against {homosexual} guilt and shame by turning sexuality into a kind of theology. Even as he was embarking on his discipleship to the carnal in 1942 he intuited that the experience of war {WWII then going on} would force Americans to find a new faith beyond self sacrifice.
"'What are we doing, we people who put words together, who project our shadows on stages' he wrote to the acclaimed German director Erwin Piscator whose first playwriting seminar at the New School Williams had attended. 'But trying to create a new and solid myth -- or FAITH -- or RELIGION -- in place of the old and desiccated and FRUITLESS one of "simple endurance"?'
"The self aggrandizement that Piscator had criticized in {Williams' play} 'Battle of Angels' when he and Williams met for the second time in 1942 -- 'Mr Williams you have written a fascist play -- all of your characters are selfishly pursuing their little personal ends and aims in life with a ruthless disregard for the wrongs and sufferings of the world around them' -- was actually a portrait of Williams' 'underground devils' and of the 'naked and savage kinds of creation' required to trap them onstage.
"The 'vast hunger for life after all this death {in the war}' that Williams had predicted to William Saroyan in 1941 had taken hold; Williams invested the 'long fingers' of desire with a sense of the divine. He referred to his own sexual spree as a 'daemon,' a divinity. Williams' characters too embodied the gospel of the flesh; in the process devils became angels." (p 96)
The individual over "society" -- almost Randian, Ayn that is -- and "sex is the answer!" Rock 'n' rollian, Lawrencian (DH not "of Arabia"!), Mailerian, James Deanian, Marilyn well you get it. Anybody? Any response?...
3RickHarsch
Nice bits, Michael, they might be appreciated at Tropic, where you ought to have your own thread, I believe.
4Michael_Welch
I dunno; it seems that WHEREVER I place these "bits" I get little response. But I honestly like writing them -- I'm my most "faithful" reader!
So I'll continue because it amuses ME eh.
When reading about Tennessee Williams one of course has to read about his most perceptive and successful director Elia Kazan and reading of Kazan one ALWAYS gets to the "naming names" uh "episode" that well rather "haunted" the rest of his life:
"When Kazan appeared for the second time {before the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities in 1952} he recanted his previous position {not to name} and listed as communist sympathizers eight members of the Group Theater {which he was part of in the 1930s} whose names were already known to the committee.
"'There was no way I could go along with their crap that the CP was nothing but another political party...' Kazan said, explaining his change of heart. 'I knew very well what it was, a thoroughly organized worldwide conspiracy. This conviction separated me from many of my old friends.'
"One of those friends was {playwright} Arthur Miller with whom Kazan had discussed his upcoming volte-face. Walking with Miller in the woods of {Miller's} 113 acre Connecticut estate Kazan explained that he couldn't see sacrificing his career for something he no longer believed in.
"'There was a certain gloomy logic in what he was saying' Miller recalled.... 'Unless he came clean he could never hope, at the height of his creative powers, to make another film in America.... If the theater remained open to him it was not his primary interest anymore; he wanted to deepen his film life, that was where his heart lay and he had been told...by...Spyros Skouras, president of Twentieth Century Fox, that the company would not employ him unless he satisfied the committee.'
"Miller added 'Who or what was now "safer" because this man...had been forced to humiliate himself? What "truth" had been enhanced by all this anguish?'
"Two days after his testimony Kazan paid for a column length ad in The New York Times -- 'A Statement By Elia Kazan' -- which was written by his wife Molly Day Thacher but signed by him:
"'...I joined the Communist party late in the summer of 1934. I got out a year and a half later.
"'I have no spy stories to tell because I saw no spies. Nor did I understand at that time any opposition between American and Russian national interest. It was not even clear to me in 1936 that the American Communist party was abjectly taking its orders from the Kremlin.
"'What I learned was the minimum that anyone must learn who puts his head into the noose of party "discipline." The communists automatically violated the daily practices of democracy to which I was accustomed. They attempted to control thought and to suppress personal opinion. They tried to dictate personal conduct. They habitually distrusted and disregarded and violated the truth.
"'All this was crudely opposite to their claims of "democracy" and "the scientific approach." To be a member of the Communist party is to have a taste of the police state. It is a diluted taste but it is bitter and unforgettable. It is diluted because you can walk out.
"'I got out in the spring of 1936....'" (pp 251-52)
Now back to "Tenn" re his not so successful play "Camino Real," directed by Kazan by the way and played in 1953, and discernments about "realists" and "romantics" in the play in Kazan's notes:
"Kazan divided the denizens of Camino Real into Realists and Romantics. The Realists were 'adjusted, make a living, have fun, are cruel yet happy, behave sensibly, have all the good things and can even afford to be generous! Remain calm, live by hurting and depriving, die.' {Kazan?}
"The Romantics on the other hand 'behave absurdly, are anxious, don't fit, are "guilty," out of place, don't get ahead because they cannot live by hurting and depriving, are unhappy, always searching and always BROKE.' {Williams, at least re SOME of the above? "Me"?} (p 268)
AND as an interesting "prediction" (for many, for me at least) in a letter to Kazan in December 1959
"...Williams added one last winded note: 'I don't feel ready for the sixties' he said." (AH! "I said.") (p 396)
AGAIN I WELCOME ANY "comments" etc., but if none I DID enjoy putting this down and it helps "focus" me re "the life" eh...
So I'll continue because it amuses ME eh.
When reading about Tennessee Williams one of course has to read about his most perceptive and successful director Elia Kazan and reading of Kazan one ALWAYS gets to the "naming names" uh "episode" that well rather "haunted" the rest of his life:
"When Kazan appeared for the second time {before the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities in 1952} he recanted his previous position {not to name} and listed as communist sympathizers eight members of the Group Theater {which he was part of in the 1930s} whose names were already known to the committee.
"'There was no way I could go along with their crap that the CP was nothing but another political party...' Kazan said, explaining his change of heart. 'I knew very well what it was, a thoroughly organized worldwide conspiracy. This conviction separated me from many of my old friends.'
"One of those friends was {playwright} Arthur Miller with whom Kazan had discussed his upcoming volte-face. Walking with Miller in the woods of {Miller's} 113 acre Connecticut estate Kazan explained that he couldn't see sacrificing his career for something he no longer believed in.
"'There was a certain gloomy logic in what he was saying' Miller recalled.... 'Unless he came clean he could never hope, at the height of his creative powers, to make another film in America.... If the theater remained open to him it was not his primary interest anymore; he wanted to deepen his film life, that was where his heart lay and he had been told...by...Spyros Skouras, president of Twentieth Century Fox, that the company would not employ him unless he satisfied the committee.'
"Miller added 'Who or what was now "safer" because this man...had been forced to humiliate himself? What "truth" had been enhanced by all this anguish?'
"Two days after his testimony Kazan paid for a column length ad in The New York Times -- 'A Statement By Elia Kazan' -- which was written by his wife Molly Day Thacher but signed by him:
"'...I joined the Communist party late in the summer of 1934. I got out a year and a half later.
"'I have no spy stories to tell because I saw no spies. Nor did I understand at that time any opposition between American and Russian national interest. It was not even clear to me in 1936 that the American Communist party was abjectly taking its orders from the Kremlin.
"'What I learned was the minimum that anyone must learn who puts his head into the noose of party "discipline." The communists automatically violated the daily practices of democracy to which I was accustomed. They attempted to control thought and to suppress personal opinion. They tried to dictate personal conduct. They habitually distrusted and disregarded and violated the truth.
"'All this was crudely opposite to their claims of "democracy" and "the scientific approach." To be a member of the Communist party is to have a taste of the police state. It is a diluted taste but it is bitter and unforgettable. It is diluted because you can walk out.
"'I got out in the spring of 1936....'" (pp 251-52)
Now back to "Tenn" re his not so successful play "Camino Real," directed by Kazan by the way and played in 1953, and discernments about "realists" and "romantics" in the play in Kazan's notes:
"Kazan divided the denizens of Camino Real into Realists and Romantics. The Realists were 'adjusted, make a living, have fun, are cruel yet happy, behave sensibly, have all the good things and can even afford to be generous! Remain calm, live by hurting and depriving, die.' {Kazan?}
"The Romantics on the other hand 'behave absurdly, are anxious, don't fit, are "guilty," out of place, don't get ahead because they cannot live by hurting and depriving, are unhappy, always searching and always BROKE.' {Williams, at least re SOME of the above? "Me"?} (p 268)
AND as an interesting "prediction" (for many, for me at least) in a letter to Kazan in December 1959
"...Williams added one last winded note: 'I don't feel ready for the sixties' he said." (AH! "I said.") (p 396)
AGAIN I WELCOME ANY "comments" etc., but if none I DID enjoy putting this down and it helps "focus" me re "the life" eh...
5RickHarsch
You know what i think about Kazan and his self-serving On the Waterfront (what a shame such a great movie has to have such a sleazy subtext)
6Michael_Welch
I suppose re "The Birth of a Nation" and "GWTW" hm.
Kazan was a VERY FINE director and MOST of his films are well worth watching. I sympathize with him -- he was apt about the "nature" of the party and got out LONG before many other "lights" and I think Miller responded in his memoir -- though at the time this ENDED their friendship -- with understanding. Kazan simply thought that "the party" and those in it weren't worth throwing away his film career.
Maybe he was right...
Kazan was a VERY FINE director and MOST of his films are well worth watching. I sympathize with him -- he was apt about the "nature" of the party and got out LONG before many other "lights" and I think Miller responded in his memoir -- though at the time this ENDED their friendship -- with understanding. Kazan simply thought that "the party" and those in it weren't worth throwing away his film career.
Maybe he was right...
7Michael_Welch
In 1960 and '61 Tennessee Williams' last "major" or "great" or "hit" play, "The Night of the Iguana," was produced without Kazan directing because K had decided to direct the film "Splendor in the Grass," based on the William Inge play, rather than Williams' "Period of Adjustment" after promising to do so.
(Kazan in an exchange with TW explained that he wanted to do what HE wanted for a change and not "depend" on the authorial visions of others. Oddly enough Kazan's film work is not as highly regarded since -- not "Splendor" with Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood which was derided by one or some as "Splendor in the Ass," perhaps referring to Inge's homosexuality; nor is Kazan's "America America," "The Arrangement" or his final movie "The Last Tycoon" although in MY perhaps "too generous" opinion I think they're all "GOOD" films if not his "best.")
"Iguana" became somewhat dependent then on acquiring a "star power" in the "it's gonna be a bump-y ride!" form of MISS Bette Davis, star extraordinaire but "dimmed" in her middle age and in the rise of the new and younger talents of the 1950s.
It seems Davis "NEEDED" a "showcase" of sorts to become "relevant" again as the sixties came to say and so she acceded to playing the "Maxine" part which was a "second fiddle" to "Hannah Jelkes" played by Margaret Leighton.
HOWEVER "a star is a STAR" of course and BD behaved as such, separating herself from the rest of the cast (literally! she would not sit with them for read throughs but had her own table and chair, "sectioned off") and becoming both resentful and envious of Leighton (who was to win a Tony for her part) and derisive of the actor Patrick O'Neal portraying "Shannon," the "crackpot" former Episcopal priest "on the run" mentally in Mexico -- "I'm tired of this Actor's Studio SHIT!" she'd bark at O'Neal in rehearsals.
She tried then to get him removed from the play as well as the beleaguered (by both Davis AND Williams) director Frank Corsaro resulting in a dramatic in its own right "blow up" (and as I once "played" the part of "Bette Davis" in two of Rick Harsch's novels I can't help focusing on the "real article"):
"News of Davis' demand {to fire O'Neal} somehow got back to O'Neal in his dressing room. He slipped into the theater. Davis saw him coming up the aisle. 'WHERE have YOU been?' she said. O'Neal charged up the stairs onto the stage. He lunged at Davis, knocking her to the ground and grabbing her by the throat.
"'Patrick almost killed her' Corsaro recalled. 'We had to run up and pull him off her. The thing that was amazing was, as he was doing it, she was smiling!' O'Neal ranted at her -- 'You filthy CUNT!' -- threw a table across the stage and stormed out of the theater.
"O'Neal wasn't fired but the next day at Davis' command Corsaro was. 'I can feel vibrations between he and I' {Davis} said, quoting a line from the play. Williams didn't defend him. 'He was a frazzled man' Corsaro said. 'You couldn't depend on him. He didn't want to get involved....'" (pp 434-35)
Finally Davis left the show after 128 performances on Broadway (replaced by Shelley Winters!):
"After her final performance Davis called the cast out onto the stage...to bid them farewell. 'I'm SO happy that everyone thinks Maggie {Leighton} is so CHARMING and Patrick is SO brilliant! I'm SORRY I had to irritate you for so long with my professionalism. You OBVIOUSLY like doing it "your way" much better! WELL! NOW you can!'
"Five months later Davis took out ads in the 'Situation Wanted' section of Variety which famously read: 'Thirty years experience as an actress in motion pictures. Mobile still and more affable than rumor would have it{!}. Wants steady employment in Hollywood. (Has had Broadway.)'" (p 438)
WELL! As she said!...
(Kazan in an exchange with TW explained that he wanted to do what HE wanted for a change and not "depend" on the authorial visions of others. Oddly enough Kazan's film work is not as highly regarded since -- not "Splendor" with Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood which was derided by one or some as "Splendor in the Ass," perhaps referring to Inge's homosexuality; nor is Kazan's "America America," "The Arrangement" or his final movie "The Last Tycoon" although in MY perhaps "too generous" opinion I think they're all "GOOD" films if not his "best.")
"Iguana" became somewhat dependent then on acquiring a "star power" in the "it's gonna be a bump-y ride!" form of MISS Bette Davis, star extraordinaire but "dimmed" in her middle age and in the rise of the new and younger talents of the 1950s.
It seems Davis "NEEDED" a "showcase" of sorts to become "relevant" again as the sixties came to say and so she acceded to playing the "Maxine" part which was a "second fiddle" to "Hannah Jelkes" played by Margaret Leighton.
HOWEVER "a star is a STAR" of course and BD behaved as such, separating herself from the rest of the cast (literally! she would not sit with them for read throughs but had her own table and chair, "sectioned off") and becoming both resentful and envious of Leighton (who was to win a Tony for her part) and derisive of the actor Patrick O'Neal portraying "Shannon," the "crackpot" former Episcopal priest "on the run" mentally in Mexico -- "I'm tired of this Actor's Studio SHIT!" she'd bark at O'Neal in rehearsals.
She tried then to get him removed from the play as well as the beleaguered (by both Davis AND Williams) director Frank Corsaro resulting in a dramatic in its own right "blow up" (and as I once "played" the part of "Bette Davis" in two of Rick Harsch's novels I can't help focusing on the "real article"):
"News of Davis' demand {to fire O'Neal} somehow got back to O'Neal in his dressing room. He slipped into the theater. Davis saw him coming up the aisle. 'WHERE have YOU been?' she said. O'Neal charged up the stairs onto the stage. He lunged at Davis, knocking her to the ground and grabbing her by the throat.
"'Patrick almost killed her' Corsaro recalled. 'We had to run up and pull him off her. The thing that was amazing was, as he was doing it, she was smiling!' O'Neal ranted at her -- 'You filthy CUNT!' -- threw a table across the stage and stormed out of the theater.
"O'Neal wasn't fired but the next day at Davis' command Corsaro was. 'I can feel vibrations between he and I' {Davis} said, quoting a line from the play. Williams didn't defend him. 'He was a frazzled man' Corsaro said. 'You couldn't depend on him. He didn't want to get involved....'" (pp 434-35)
Finally Davis left the show after 128 performances on Broadway (replaced by Shelley Winters!):
"After her final performance Davis called the cast out onto the stage...to bid them farewell. 'I'm SO happy that everyone thinks Maggie {Leighton} is so CHARMING and Patrick is SO brilliant! I'm SORRY I had to irritate you for so long with my professionalism. You OBVIOUSLY like doing it "your way" much better! WELL! NOW you can!'
"Five months later Davis took out ads in the 'Situation Wanted' section of Variety which famously read: 'Thirty years experience as an actress in motion pictures. Mobile still and more affable than rumor would have it{!}. Wants steady employment in Hollywood. (Has had Broadway.)'" (p 438)
WELL! As she said!...
