Nosing around for dramas of ‘Desire’

The publication of Sam Staggs’ latest Hollywood biography, “When Blanche Met Brando,” is rather well-timed. Christie’s will hold an auction in New York late this month for “The Personal Property of Marlon Brando,” featuring items from the actor’s long career and famously well-guarded private life. After stunning critics with his raging Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire” in 1947, Brando went on to star in more than 40 films -- but “Streetcar” was his defining performance and arguably Williams’ greatest play.

Staggs has a penchant for gossipy titles, including “All About ‘All About Eve’: The Complete Behind-the-Scenes Story of the Bitchiest Film Ever Made!” and “Close-Up on ‘Sunset Boulevard’: Billy Wilder, Norma Desmond, and the Dark Hollywood Dream,” which seem to promise deep secrets. His latest title similarly promises a “scandalous story” about the goings-on behind the early stage productions of “Streetcar” and of Elia Kazan’s seminal 1951 film adaptation. And there are nuggets of trivia and surprising stories. But one must contend with Stagg’s distracting authorial voice: breathless, self-important, melodramatic and, in some passages, just plain bizarre.

Staggs writes like an awestruck “Streetcar” fan. Yet the virtue of this lies in his passion and willingness to research even the most minute aspect of his subject. Sometimes it proves tedious: We are told that after the play’s opening night on Dec. 3, 1947, Williams, his brother and mother were silent during the taxi ride from the theater to the restaurant 21. Then he adds, “The silence could not have been prolonged, however; it’s a five-block ride.”

Staggs follows the evolution of the play, which took Williams about four years to write and obsessively revise. Stanley Kowalski was his final choice after considering many character names: Stanley Landowski, Ralph Stanley and Ralph Kowalski. The character was Italian, then Irish, then Polish. And Blanche DuBois -- whom Staggs considers Williams’ greatest character -- began as Blanche Shannon of Chicago before becoming DuBois of New Orleans. Greta Garbo was Williams’ first casting choice for Blanche in the film version; she declined. Vivien Leigh got the part rather than Jessica Tandy, who originated the role on Broadway. And the play’s lyrical title replaced such contenders as “Electric Avenue,” “Go, Said the Bird,” “The Poker Night” and “Blanche’s Chair in the Moon.”

The author brings together firsthand accounts of the casting (for stage and film), the rehearsals and the problems encountered along the way. He also chronicles the founding of the legendary Actors Studio in the fall of 1947. The school shaped a generation of Method-based actors and directors.

Staggs spares no metaphor in describing his awe for Williams’ play: “The play is an institution, and an enigma.... [I]t looms like a strange temple or museum, seductive and forbidding, a majestic emblem of American culture -- with its tail in the mud.” He calls the drama “a root canal on the soul” and a “fever dream” that “seduces with its disordered exoticism and its power to engulf.”

Overheated as his prose may be, Staggs is right. “Streetcar,” with its intensity, sexuality and unresolved rage, was truly groundbreaking. The play won the Pulitzer Prize and numerous other awards, and had an initial run of 855 performances -- the longest of any Williams play. Film director Franco Zeffirelli once declared it “one marvelous mad scene from beginning to end.”

Never again, Staggs writes, would Williams win such universal adulation. The film, nominated for 12 Academy Awards, won four, including acting awards for Karl Malden, Kim Hunter and Leigh.

So where is the “scandalous” material touted in the book’s title? Scattered throughout are references to Brando’s sexual prowess and extreme weirdness; director Kazan’s prima donna behavior and romantic exploits with Kim Hunter (his Stella Kowalski); Leigh’s mental breakdown and so on. More compelling than the gossip, though, is Staggs’ study of the censorship that plagued the film, threatening its release and finances, and the editing cuts Kazan made after a judge had deemed the film “immoral” with its “sex, nymphomania, and liquor.”

The book is stuffed so full of anecdotes, obscure trivia and detailed analysis -- Staggs devotes an entire chapter to deconstructing Jessica Tandy -- that only the most die-hard reader will remain engaged by the end. That said, with his infectious devotion to “Streetcar,” Staggs surely will motivate many to revisit the play and watch the film, armed with the overwhelming insight and detail he has provided.

Carmela Ciuraru is the editor of six anthologies of poetry, including the most recent, “Motherhood: Poems About Mothers.”