Tennessee Williams Took His Name Off It
January, 1966
SCENE: Seven a.m. in the heart of the old French Quarter, where a film crew is setting up cameras for This Property Is Condemned. Black marsh rain beats down on store windows. Along the street, signs advertise Dr. Pepper at a nickel a bottle, gasoline at 12 cents a gallon, eggs at 10 cents a dozen, and the main feature on the marquee at the Delta Brilliant Theater is One-Way Passage starring William Powell and Kay Francis. The crew has worked hard to achieve the ambience of the depressed Thirties.
Suddenly white klieg lights cut through the rain and fog. Someone yells “action” and Hollywood golden girl Natalie Wood darts from a stone courtyard, looking like a rich man’s Dixie Dugan, with 1930 ankle strap pumps, low-cut blouse, straight black skirt, mesh stockings and a beaded bag. As she hurries along, 300,000 gallons of water are sprayed on her head from a hose on the back of a moving truck. When she reaches the corner, five assistants rush to cover her with a yellow bathrobe. Onlookers cheer from under their umbrellas.
Sipping a hot buttered rum, Miss Wood dries her hair and collapses in the portable dressing room in her trailer. “Great way to grow old, shlepping around in the rain at 7 o’clock in the morning. I’ll bet the local yokels think we’re nuts. As if the rain’s not bad enough, James Wong Howe, who’s photographing this clambake, has to pour more water on me. He says real rain doesn’t photograph unless it’s back-lit with Hollywood lights or painted silver. My co-star, Robert Redford, is in bed with fever, the director is coming down with pneumonia. I ask you, is this a helluva way to make a living?”
Two weeks of New Orleans rain was the least of the 77-man company’s problems. Back at the studio, six people had already written and rewritten the script, about a girl named Alva Starr who grows up in a world of daydreams and gauze butterflies in a dull little Mississippi railroad town during the Depression. Then Tennessee Williams, whose original one-act play provided the source for the two-and-one-half-hour film, took one look at the completed script and refused to allow his name to be connected with the picture, either on or off the screen.
In Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, where the cast spent five weeks shooting scenes in Alva’s boarding house, a petition was filed by a local newspaper publisher to deny the company access to the public roads, and the local mayor used his influence (unsuccessfully) to try to drive the group out of town. In New Orleans for background scenes in which Alva runs away from home and falls into a life of prostitution, the company had another misadventure. One local citizen pushed a cameraman off the sidewalk in front of her French Quarter apartment, shouting, “I’m clean living and I’ll have no part of a dirty Tennessee Williams movie around my property.”
Plagued by endless miseries which would be thorns in the sturdiest of sides, 33-year-old director Sidney Pollack was taking it like a man. Sitting half-hidden behind the sanctuary of a banana tree, he looked very much like a young Arthur Miller—eager smile, set jaw, black horn-rimmed glasses, Ivy-League corduroy trench coat. “When I was a director on ‘Ben Casey,’ we never had problems like these. But I still prefer working on location. My only previous film, The Slender Thread, was shot in Seattle and my trademark in future films will always be locations. It’s costly because you work slower. On a sound stage you can get five takes in ten minutes, but here you’re lucky to get five in an hour. But this New Orleans, this crazy broken-down city—you could never duplicate it in Hollywood. Everywhere you look you see history.” He pointed up, above the street, to the side of a sagging old building which, untouched by any movie crew, still read: “Uneeda—National Biscuit Co.—5 cents a package.”
“Look at that sign, it’s pop art!”
Across the street, an animal trainer turned loose a carton of pigeons for the next scene. They hobbled along sadly, wings clipped, pecking at grain mixed with tranquilizers. “Poor little dopes. But we can’t let them fly up in Natalie’s face and ruin the scene,” said snow-haired James Wong Howe, who, according to the crew, had threatened to walk off the picture twice since the company had arrived in New Orleans.
“He’s a testy little bastard,” said Pollack, “but he knows his business. He’s one of the world’s greatest cameramen, a member of the old school, used to calling the shots himself. We’ve had a few blowups. I’m very progressive. To him I’m a ‘hipster,’ and it’s hard for him to take orders. But I think he’s pleased with the results. The main problem is making the story more contemporary than its Thirties setting. It could’ve been just another out-of-style Summer and Smoke. I’m not sure I can get away with it, but I’m changing styles in the middle of the film. The New Orleans scenes are done with a liquid dreamlike flow because they show Natalie’s downfall. I’ve cut out all the soap opera Camille stuff, where she dies of a lung disease, and jazzed up some of the shots. The end, for instance, just kills me—it was shot on the railroad tracks from a hand car with a helicopter which takes off from the hand car and photographs the whole town and countryside. Then there’s a five-page dialogue scene between Natalie and Redford that will be shot in six different locations without stopping the dialogue, right through eye-level sunsets in Pirate’s Alley and light filtering through magnolia trees. Pretty Truffaut-ish, but that’s the miracle of film. Everything comes out different.”
Inside her trailer, Natalie Wood got the word that it was raining too hard to shoot any more that day. “Come on up to the hotel with the gang,” she said, “where things make sense.” Later, around dusk, she sat on the floor of her suite at the top of the Royal Orleans Hotel, dressed in a leopard-skin nightgown, her all-American face scrubbed and shining, heartily attacking an order of eggs Benedict on the coffee table. Surrounding her was her entourage: Mart Crowley, an ex-secretary (male) who was passing through town from Jackson, Mississippi; photographer William Claxton, who occasionally takes a picture Natalie will eventually have to approve before it can be published; a male hairdresser named B.J., who works on all of her films; and a maid named Blanche who, Natalie claims, “has worked for them all, even Jean Harlow.”
Somebody phoned from Hollywood to read the reviews of her last picture, Inside Daisy Clover. She squealed with glee, repeating portions of the conversation to the gang in a Shirley Temple voice. “Best film ever made about Hollywood—oooo—instant identification—ooo—grabs them where they live, eh?” The entourage danced around singing “Curtain up, light the lights, we got nothin’ to hit but the heights . . .”
“Actresses!” Miss Wood grumbled, flopping on the floor again. “We work our tails off and the best scenes get cut and we’re the last ones to know. That’s why I never go to the daily rushes any more. I can’t tell what’s good and what isn’t. They pay me a lotta money, I go everywhere for location shooting, but it doesn’t have any relation to anything. You can’t get thrown by the glamour part. I went on my first location when I was 6 years old, with Orson Welles in Tomorrow Is Forever. I was in New York, and I remember I fell madly in love with Louie, the headwaiter at the Carlton. I was in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, and I had chicken salad for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It’s been like that ever since. This is the hardest role I’ve ever done—it’s probably the closest I’ll ever get to playing Blanche DuBois, so I’d better make the most of it.
“Alva is a great character, always ordering Sazerac cocktails and longing for the excitement of the big city. She wants out of her small town with a capital O, and she’ll do anything to get away. There’s plenty of room at the bottom if she stays. My own life hasn’t been so different. There was plenty of room at the bottom if I’d kept making those Tab Hunter movies. I had to fight for everything. I was once on suspension for 18 months, but at the end of it I did West Side Story, so it was worth it. You get tough in this business, until you get big enough to hire people to get tough for you. Then you can sit back and be a lady.”
Outside, it was still raining. Up above the city, Natalie Wood, super-star, had just received a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne from her producer, Ray Stark, in New York. The note read: “Dear Natalie: As long as it’s pouring so hard, pour a little of this.” She tossed the note aside and ordered a bottle of aspirin from room service.
The others had left for a night on the town. “Movie stars, ha! There was a period in Mississippi where all the emotional scenes were building up in one week and I kept thinking, I’m a grownup lady, what am I crying all day for? Down here they give me a chauffeur and a limousine and a gorgeous hotel suite with three bedrooms, a den, living room and kitchen. Maybe Natalie Wood the star is worth it, but I can’t believe Nat the girl is. What does it mean? If I go to restaurants, my food gets cold while I sign autographs. If I go antique shopping on Royal Street, a crowd gathers. On the other hand, I’ve got a healthy bank account, a couple of oil wells, a professional reputation—you give up one thing to get another. I guess from here you’ve got nowhere to go but down.”
She took her Juicy Fruit gum out of her mouth, replaced it with a thermometer, poured a glass of Dom Perignon, looked down at the birthday cake colors of the French Quarter and, like most super-stars, wondered what the night would bring.