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Table of Contents | Archives | Print Versions |
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 Number 9 —2007
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Problems with Boss Finley
Permissions: ©2007 by The University of the South. Previously unpublished material by Tennessee Williams printed by permission of the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee. All rights whatsoever are strictly reserved and all inquiries should be made to Georges Borchardt, Inc., at 136 E. 57th St., New York, NY 10022. Grateful acknowledgment is also made to the Harry Ransom Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin and to the University of Delaware Library, Newark, Delaware.
After the huge success of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947, Tennessee Williams decided to develop the left-wing tendencies of
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 ¶ 2 |
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In its early stages, Williams’s interest in Long waxed and waned. On November 18, 1948, he sent an enthusiastic letter to his agent, Audrey Wood:
The letter goes on to request that Wood’s secretary find some reference books on Long and try to discover whether the governor’s speeches are accessible. One research avenue, however, is off limits:
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¶ 3 |
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The following year, Warren’s novel was made into a successful film. Perhaps not coincidentally, Williams turned his attentions elsewhere. In a letter to the Kazans, postmarked Rome, he claims to have lost interest in the project as early as the previous December:
A journal entry dated December 5, 1948, written on board the liner Vulcania, confirms the shift in plans:
This marks an important turning point in the playwright’s political development. Williams would continue to distrust those in authority and to sympathize with the socially marginalized (hence his dossier with the FBI)—but as he would put it subsequently, his politics remained “those of the heart.” |
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¶ 4 |
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A “Tentative Outline” and nine pages of the opening scene in pencil holograph survive for “Big Time Operators,” in addition to some later scattered fragments. The chief characters are the Huey Long figure, Pere Polk (Polk is the name of a Louisiana parish); Boss Finley, the cynical organizer of his party “machine”; and a fifteen-year-old Mexican whore called Candy. The Outline runs as follows:
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It is worth noting that even this early, the majority of sequences deal with sexual relations rather than politics, a pattern that would recur as Williams continued to develop the material. Having no real understanding of (or, perhaps, interest in) Long’s outrageous political maneuvering, Williams made the crux of Pere Polk’s downfall his fatal passion for a juvenile hooker. |
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¶ 6 |
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The holograph of the first scene shows promise. It takes place in a cabin on a key off the Gulf Coast that serves as Polk’s rural retreat. Because dialogue begins in medias res, an earlier page (or pages) would likely have described the setting. Another Polk fragment entitled “Brush Hangs Burning” provides a good sense of the setting, at this stage of the play’s development:
The crying of gulls and the intermittent lighthouse beam survive to Sweet Bird of Youth. |
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¶ 7 |
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In the holograph Polk is up a ladder painting (in another draft, tacking up oil lamps) and talking to his manipulative henchman, Boss Finley:
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In later fragments, the Boss assures Pere’s unpleasant wife—who cares only for her “sissy” son and seems to reflect Cornelius Williams’s indictments of Edwina—that Candy provides a “string” with which to manipulate the governor. |
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There are obvious parallels between this presentation of Polk and the real-life Huey Long. A “messiah of the rednecks” (Schlesinger) with a Baptist preacher’s rhetoric and fiery, vote-winning stump speeches, Long became the youngest governor in Louisiana history and, later, a senator with aspirations to the White House. With no secondary education, he became a lawyer after only eight and a half months’ study—in Huey’s case, as a non-credit student at Tulane, via a special oral bar exam. In his portrayal of Polk, Williams uses, and then crosses out, the Long slogan “Every Man a King”—itself taken from William Jenning Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech and used as a campaign song and the title of Long’s autobiography. (Stanley Kowalski would later echo the phrase in A Streetcar Named Desire). Polk is closely connected to racketeers, as Long was to the New York mobster Frank Costello. Later fragmentary drafts add further details reminiscent of Long: a narrow escape from impeachment; armed body guards who double as hit men; collusions with gangsters and Texas oil executives; and the innovative use of radio, sound trucks, and a Dixie band to attract and influence voters. |
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¶ 9 |
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Other details, however, seem more likely to derive from the career of Huey’s younger brother, Earl, who was governor of Louisiana when Williams was living in New Orleans. Though Huey did have a young mistress—his “secretary” Alice Lee Grosjean, whom he met when she was eighteen and installed in hotel suites in Baton Rouge and New Orleans—Alice was nothing like the naïve Candy: she claimed aristocratic antecedents and became Louisiana’s secretary of state. It was Earl Long, not his brother, who was notorious for cavorting with strippers and common prostitutes, including the celebrated Blaze Starr (who scandalized Baton Rouge by turning up at his funeral). One of Earl’s paramours was actually called “Candy” Kane. It was Earl, moreover, who “wasn’t even house-broke” (Peoples 445) and urinated in public (he had a bladder problem); Earl who was involved in the New Deal’s Home Owners Loan Corporation that Finley is accused of bilking;6 and Earl who kept a famous rural retreat, the “Pea Farm.” |
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Although both Longs used segregationist language, neither was racist. In fact, each did his utmost to ensure that African Americans shared in Louisiana’s social progress, and Earl—described ironically by A. J. Liebling of The New Yorker as “the only effective Civil Rights man in the South” (233)—was temporarily institutionalized for doing so. The racism of Boss Finley in Sweet Bird of Youth, which is even more rancid in the drafts, derives not from either of the Longs but from later opposition to the Civil Rights movement. In this regard, Boss Finley recalls Earl Long’s opponents, not Earl himself. |
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However, the Long brothers were certainly morally ambiguous—particularly the brilliant, charismatic, and Machiavellian Huey. They were responsible for a great deal of reform legislation—in transport, education, health, and insurance for the poor—but their methods were protofascist, subverting the law whenever it suited them. “I am the Constitution,” proclaimed Huey (Kane 64), paraphrasing Louis XIV of France; his “Bureau of Criminal Investigation” was virtually a private army, through which he governed by intimidation. When Huey announced his intention to run for president in 1934, Franklin D. Roosevelt called him one of the two most dangerous men in America (the other being General Douglas MacArthur). The more Williams read about the Longs, the more he would have been confronted with their sinister side. |
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¶ 12 |
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Williams’s first solution, obviously, was to divide the good side represented by Pere Polk from the bad side represented by Boss Finley. In one untitled draft ( Texas, 47.4), under the influence of an idealistic speechwriter (whom the Boss condemns as “a Jew Boy carpetbagger with red ideas”), Pere admits that the state political machine has corrupted him, and he decides to run again on a reformist ticket without it (saying, “rut the machine . . . wash me white”). Ignoring a throat illness, he leaves for the impoverished hill country of his most fervent supporters with a cavalcade of sound trucks and a band playing “Auld Lang Syne.” Meanwhile, back in the suite in which she has been installed as his mistress, Candy dreams that Pere has left her and springs out of bed; Boss Finley savagely concurs: “The dream is true, girl. He’s gone.” |
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¶ 13 |
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In “Brush Hangs Burning” (Delaware F68), a one-act whose title refers to irate citizens burning a straw effigy of the governor on the statehouse steps, Williams tries to combine the two sides of Huey Long in a protagonist with the composite name “Pere Finley.” Like the opening of “Big Time Operators,” this fragment takes place in Pere’s hideaway cabin on the Gulf. Pere and Candy quarrel because of his recent impotence, caused, he claims, by “anxiety neurosis” about her sexual demands; as Candy storms out, naked under his Christmas gift of a fur coat, Pere’s idealistic speechwriter arrives. Following a gap, the manuscript resumes with Pere arguing with Doc (the former “Boss” figure) about the reformist speeches that have been written for him—and wondering how far his anxiety about that “little blonde-headed girl in a pink negligée” has undermined his efficiency as governor. The conversation is interrupted by a radio announcement that a warrant has just been issued for Pere’s arrest. Doc orders the boardwalk to the shore to be blown up (as in “Big Time Operators”) and exits through a trapdoor to escape by boat. After cowering on his great pink bed and ordering his servant to fly pink lingerie from the roof as a sign of defiance,7 and echoing T. S. Eliot, Pere asks, wryly, who said that the world would end not with a bang but a whimper—and makes his own ignominious retreat through the trapdoor. |
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¶ 14 |
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What Williams tries to develop in a blizzard of draft fragments that follow (bewildering even by his own chaotic standards) is a combination of sequences in which the Huey Long figure, increasingly called Boss Finley, is caught between an Eastern speechwriter, Otto, who believes him to be a “Lincoln manqué,” and the dishonest machine politician, Doc. In the pink bedroom sequences, where he has installed his mistress (and where the Boss tries to conduct business with gangsters and Texas oilmen or to argue with Otto or Doc), intermittent phone calls from his chauffeur keep him informed about the progress of his mistress’s escape with her boxer-lover, Phil Beam8—which sometimes Boss gets into the newspapers for pursuing. The Boss, in other words, is shown in these pre-Kazan drafts succumbing to the triple disasters of jilting by his mistress, legal attacks, and an increasingly painful throat cancer—the stench of which has alienated his mistress further, and in several fragments results in his sudden death from hemorrhage. Williams’s attitude to the character has become progressively more negative. |
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¶ 15 |
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The Boss Finley character in Sweet Bird is very different, of course: still contradictory, but much simpler. Kazan, not Williams, pieced together draft material to construct the initial version of act 2 of Sweet Bird (Parker). Williams was accustomed to have his plots accumulate slowly from many rewritings, not to match a scenario that had already been laid out. The Finley that Kazan confronted him with is a vicious yet successful politician. Updated to the Civil Rights period, he is no longer in love with his middle-aged mistress, Miss Lucy, whom he treats with indifferent brutality; fiscal chicanery has given place to a racism lacking in the earlier, Long-inspired versions. Williams tried to convey his disgust with this character in drafts showing Finley’s relish in the castration of Chance Wayne; his vicious riding of “the racial hate horse”; his plan to marry his daughter Heavenly off to a much older business crony; and his bragging of having to take Heavenly’s fair-skinned mother sexually by force because she “wasn’t warm-blooded like I was.” But, as Brenda Murphy documents (152 –53), by the New York opening all such denigrations of Boss Finley had been removed by Kazan, whose director’s Notebook for the play shows a surprising sympathy for the character. Defensive about all heterodoxy since he himself named names to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Kazan stresses Finley’s “sincerity” both as a political “MARTYR and HERO” and as a father whose love is “deeply, truly emotional: he takes easily to tears.” Kazan suggests that Miss Lucy should still be attracted to the Boss “because he is BIG, GENEROUS, FUN, DARING. And in most regions, honest” (Parker). While Williams’s view of the character had grown steadily darker, Kazan seems to have stayed with the original Pere Polk concept and envisaged Finley as a crude and ruthless but essentially honest and life-affirming figure like Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He wanted the audience to have some sympathy for Finley. |
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¶ 16 |
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Williams, however, now found such an attitude totally antipathetic. As he explained in an interview for Theatre Arts:
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¶ 17 |
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Williams’s original attraction to the “fantastically uninhibited” and “essentially honest” populism of Huey Long had become twisted hopelessly out of shape—and in the playwright’s opinion, this development had ruined the play. Yet, paradoxically, when Williams radically reduced the Finley sections in his 1962 Dramatists Play Service revision, act 2 worked even less well than before. Sensibly, it was the original New Directions script that Williams included in volume 4 of his collected Theatre of Tennessee Williams (1972) and approved for the next major stage revival in 1975. Unfortunately, that text fails to capture the full effect of Kazan’s theatricalism, the “tricks” the director said were necessary to rescue Williams’s script.9 |
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¶ 18 |
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On the page, without Kazan’s bravura staging, the character of Boss Finley remains morally and dramatically problematic. He is neither Kazan’s “sincere” statesman and caring father, nor the hateful political and domestic bully that Williams had come to consider him. Or, rather, he is both. It is a disagreement that goes right back to the enigma posed for Tennessee Williams by Huey Long himself.10 |
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Notes |
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Notes
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Works Cited
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| © Copyright 2007, The Tennessee Williams Annual Review. All rights reserved. |
