Another version of the envelope story, Part I
Rave frequently started with “Hope you’re okay,” when she really meant “Why haven’t I heard from you?” Sometimes she’d leave phone messages with “Is this still the correct number for S.?” It was all clearly manipulative, because I saw her every week, but I put a limit around further engagement to set some boundaries in life. For approximately 2–3 hours every Friday she had my undivided attention, but the rest of the week I did other things. This didn’t always sit well with her, but she learned to live with it. My feeling was that the key to longevity in such a friendship is pacing.
She speaks here, as she did so often, of not taking a salary, a “tell” we might now frame as Old Hollywood privilege. We never discussed her parents’ finances, but her father would have earned a fine income as a leading cinematographer, and her mother — although disinherited in the most direct sense — enjoyed some kind of trust income from her prominent California family. There is a secret to why the mother was disinherited, and I have my suspicions about it but I don’t really know for certain. Eventually I’ll share some of these, when family stories arise more specifically.
And yes, this story has yet another version of her opening an envelope postmarked Mexico from an as-yet-unknown Thomas Lanier Williams. Elsewhere she’ll tell stories about him sending her play ideas written on bar napkins as well. In this version, Audrey Wood reads the play first, whereas in other versions Rave did the first reading, and later took credit for it in conversations with him. Which of these stories is true? Maybe all of them, as a pastiche. The memory plays tricks after decades, and she was in her early ’90s when she wrote this.
Hi — Hope you’re OK —
A California friend stopped by the other day, on his way to New York, and we got onto the subject of Audrey Wood. He had just read the book she co-authored (I have a copy here somewhere!). And he heard a few of the stories I told him about my years with her and William Liebling, her husband.
He said “Write the story! The editor of Theatre magazine should know of those early years!”
He was really excited. (He’s off to live in the South of France, and he’s 82 years old, so he said I was on my own with this — he’s too ancient to do any more for me but read it!) So I promised to put pen to paper what I remember of those exciting years and the “discovery” of Bill Inge and T. Williams.
In the beginning there was AUDREY. She was New York’s #2 play agent. The #1 agent was Harold Freedman of Brandt & Brandt, and I knew him. Also — he managed Robert Sherwood and other prize-winners, but Audrey had Tennessee Williams and she was hell-bent on making him a prize-winner and of course she succeeded.
Audrey opened a small agency in Beverly Hills in the late 1940s — I can’t remember the exact date — was it 1950? Or thereabouts. It was a perfect little office — in one of the city’s newest buildings. Three rooms — I saw out in front, as I’d volunteered to be her receptionist. No salary. I loved the job, refused taking a dime for it, and was in hog heaven.
All the latest scripts from New York and the world seemed to arrive for Audrey’s attention, but she passed all of them to me first — she was engrossed and in love with Hollywood. My father, who was working for MGM at the time, threw open the doors for her and she swept through like a Queen Been. Everyone at the studio fought to meet her, for she was friendly and sincere and talented and on the way up and that gets around in Hollywood — Believe me — she thought nothing about all the fuss and attention, and I was stuck in her office reading a thousand scripts a day and fighting off would-be writers.
The Liebling-Wood Agency in NYC was a big-time enterprise, and to have Audrey accept a script was a reason for celebration. She could get just about any play produced — Brooks Atkinson, the New York Times theatrical critic, called her “The Best in the Business” — he had said that of Harold Freedman, but Harold was getting ready to retire, so who else but Audrey? Who else, indeed…
One day, a tattered envelope was delivered to the Beverly Hills office and I opened it. Audrey was in her office (five steps away from my desk), and I called out “What do you think of this for a title? ‘Gentleman Caller.’”
“Not much,” she hollered back.
“Why? It’s post-marked Mexico, and the envelope’s got jam all over it. Something sticky.”
“Open it,” she said.
I opened it, wiping it off first.
“Gentleman Caller”(the cover)
I opened it. “By Thomas Lanier Williams.” I took it into Audrey’s office.
“There’s jam on the first page, too. And it’s been typed on toilet paper. I lied. I think it’s toilet paper.”
“Read it,” Audrey said.
“No,” I told her. “It’s marked PERSONAL.”
“Oh hell,” Audrey said, “Give it to me.”
So Audrey Wood read it, and it became “A Glass Menagerie,” and I kept on reading scripts for her (now in New York City) and watched from the sidelines as Tenn went on to win prizes, etc., etc., etc.
(To be continued…)
