Sam Staggs - When blanche met brando: the scandalous story of a streetcar named desire

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CONTENTS

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To Rhoda Coleman Ellison, Teacher and Friend

In her forties now shed be, I dont know, fifty, girding up her lovely little loins, getting ready for the change.

Samuel Beckett, All That Fall

I know those are your hands I know it, but to me they are white tarantulas, dont touch me.

Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider

Have you heard that poor, dear Blanche

Got run down by an avalanche?

Cole Porter, Well, Did You Evah?

AUTHORS NOTE

Like orchestra members tuning up before a concert, the three epigraphs preceding strike the first notes of my symphony. Most books are indeed symphonic, or should be, structured in several parts or movements following a pattern that includes a variety of fast, slow, and moderate tempi. Without forcing my metaphor, a narrative such as this one might be said to contrast the emotionally rhythmic with the lyric, and to include colors, tones, timbres, and other musical qualities.

The first epigraph, from Beckett, states the theme of suggestion: the conceit that Blanche DuBois transcends words on the page and thus, existing somewhere in the past and the future, is available to our speculations on her life and emotions. The second theme is aesthetic horror, chillingly expressed by Katherine Anne Porters white tarantulas. Finally, the wit of Cole Porter, with its aroma of camp, matches up nicely with the works of Tennessee Williams and with A Streetcar Named Desire in particular. Yet this side of the playwright has been shoved back in the closet by the procession of solemn commentators who have enshrined him. Although I consider Tennessee one of the worlds greats, I wont dishonor his spirit by writing about him with the piety of a politician at a White House prayer breakfast whos courting the vote.

* * *

I wrote, of course, the book I wanted to read. In this case I was curious about A Streetcar Named Desire , and since the play itself doesnt really have the usual beginning, middle, and end, I wondered if the phenomenon of Streetcar might possess a more traditional arc than the work itself. I wanted to raise the question, also, of whether this phenomenonthe canonical critiques and the vast digressions, the pop culture trappings and overlaysmight upstage the actual play and film.

Streetcar , in all its manifestations, expands and accelerates like the universe since the Big Bang. My hope is that I have to some extent succeeded in rounding up this dramatic Cosmos like a Carl Sagan of the stage and screen, and so conveying my own excitement and awe to readers.

To do so, I set out to synthesize, as no previous writer has, the firsthand accounts of those who were there on Broadway in 1947, in London in 1949, and in Hollywood in 1950 and 1951. Some of these accounts were written, others I heard from members of the various casts and from those in the audience who have never forgotten. With the exceptions of Elia Kazan and Marlon Brando, I interviewed the survivors of those three bedrock productions.

By the time I began my book, Kazan was infirm and besides, he had said it all already in his own writings and to interviewers, far more than I could incorporate unless I produced a Streetcar encyclopedia. I wrote to Marlon Brando, but my letter, sent in 2003, got there fifty years too late. The young Brando in these pages is the one who just might have responded, for he had not yet succumbed to the haunting malady that he alludes to in his autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me : I mourn the sadness of their lives while looking for clues to their psyches and, by extension, my own.

Above all, I wanted to avoid the heavy hand of many who write about Tennessee Williams and his plays. Reading these, I felt as though I had stumbled into a taxidermists shop crammed with exhibitswhere nothing breathed. Instead, I determined to engage the material, step back and make a narrow-eyed appraisal, laugh, call it names, scrutinize it, live with it, and finally drive it into a corner and proclaim, A-ha! Having done all this, I realized that my half-skeptical a-ha! had revolved into an amazed, and adoring, Ah, yes!

I hope the reader, having finished the final page, will say, He wrote the book I wanted to read.

INTRODUCTION

The Twelve Last Words of Blanche

Not long ago I was on the subway in Manhattan headed from Chelsea to the Upper West Side when the door opened at one end of the car and a tall Jamaican man made his entrance. Spectacular was his head, with pounds of Rastafarian dreadlocks spilling from under a great orange calypso cloth. Normally I would continue reading; this time, however, I took in the pageant, gripped by the one-man show.

This man was a master of high-speed street theatre in the noisy grime of New York underground. He pranced to the middle of the car and in his island accenthalf-lilting, half-grudgingmade an impassioned plea for an obscure charity purporting to consign unwed mothers to a halfway house in some outer borough of the city. His arms danced, his words accelerated as the train sped on. The poor waifs he intoned. Fallen women Did he really say that? Perhaps he was only lamenting those unfortunates who had fallen on hard times. My interest flagged as the train screeched toward Seventy-second Street.

But his peroration recaptured me, for just before the doors opened he preached in a baleful voice, Ladies and gentlemen, have you sorrows? All of us need help at times. He bowed to the right, he bowed to the left, and quickly passed around a plastic cup. Ladies, gentlemen, we need to depend on the kindness of strangers.

* * *

A year or so earlier I had stumbled on another homilyless impromptu, more traditionaltitled just that: The Kindness of Strangers. It was delivered by the Reverend Peter Gomes, chaplain at the Memorial Church, Harvard, and professor in the universitys Divinity School. The wry Mr. Gomes used the phrase in speaking of the Good Samaritan in the Gospel parable.

Since I wish to linger on this connection for a moment, I quote the brief parable in J. B. Phillipss crisp translation: A man was once on his way down from Jerusalem to Jericho. He fell into the hands of bandits who stripped off his clothes, beat him up, and left him half dead. It so happened that a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. A Levite also came on the scene, and when he saw him he too passed by on the other side. But then a Samaritan traveler came along to the place where the man was lying, and at the sight of him he was touched with pity. He went across to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put him on his own mule, brought him to an inn and did what he could for him. Next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper with the words: Look after him, will you? I will pay you back whatever more you spend, when I come through here on my return.