THEY say that, in the theater, the playwright is king.
So today’s column is a royal procession – Tennessee Williams, Harold Pinter and Noel Coward.
Gore Vidal, who abandoned Broadway in the ’60s because he was tired of “being graded” by critics, has just completed an unfinished Tennessee Williams play called “Masks Outrageous and Austere.”
Directed by Peter Bogdanovich, and starring his former lover Cybill Shepherd, the play is likely to open on Broadway in the spring.
“Tennessee left about 10 pages of the play behind when he died,” Vidal tells me. “You could tell where he was going with it. I’ve tried to get the best of him because I think it’s a very good play.”
He declined to discuss plot details, but a source says the play is about a billionairess (Shepherd), her gay husband and his young male lover.
The source says the billionairess is based on Jane Smith, a friend of Williams who was an actress, an opera singer and part of the circle of Abstract Expressionist artists in the ’40s and ’50s.
The wife of sculptor Tony Smith, she died in 2005.
Vidal, however, vehemently denies she’s the subject of the play.
“Good God, no! Why do they bring poor Jane Smith into this? The woman in the play is an alcoholic nymphomaniac. There is no remote connection. Tennessee had a number of monster women in his life – starting with his mother – but Jane was not one of them.”
Williams did in fact hang out with rich women in New York, though Vidal says the playwright was no Truman Capote when it came to courting society.
Imitating Capote’s high-pitched nasal voice, Vidal says: “Truman thought he was dealing with aristocracy, when all he was doing was having lunch with women who outlived their rich husbands.”
Vidal, who was a close friend of Williams, is still bitter about the shabby treatment the author of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and “A Streetcar Named Desire” received from critics later in his career.
“He suffered a lot from them, though I do not consider people who write for newspapers critics,” he says. “They may up their humble situation, but they make no contribution.
“They said he was a little faggot, so what would he know about women? And I went on television many times to cut their throats.”
HAROLD Pinter, who’s fight ing cancer, wasn’t well enough to attend the revival of “The Homecoming,” which opened Sunday night at the Cort.
But his producer, Jeffrey Richards, phoned him in London at 4 a.m. New York time to read him the raves.
“How are you feeling?” Richards asked.
“All right. (Pause) Much better now, Jeffrey.”
The 77-year-old Pinter kept tabs on the production from London, vetoing an ad that showed a pair of sexy legs under the tagline: “There are some things fathers and sons should never share.”
“My play is sensual,” said Pinter. “It is not vulgar.”
THE best theater book in stores right now is “The Letters of Noel Coward” (Knopf), edited by Barry Day.
Coward’s wit and sophistication sparkle on every page, though here and there a scratch of frustration cuts across the gem-like surface of his prose.
Here he writes about a young man with whom he’s smitten:
“I can already see the hoops being prepared to put me through . . . He called me up, very tenderly; since then, I haven’t heard a bloody word.”
To his friend Marlene Dietrich – herself madly obsessed with Yul Brynner, whom Coward called “Curly”: “To hell with God damned L’Amour. Don’t run after it. Don’t court it. Keep it waiting off stage until you’re good and ready for it. And even then treat it with the suspicious disdain that it deserves.”
But his wit never deserted him for long. After seeing his by now former young lover in a play, he wrote: “He is much improved and acting in an Off Broadway artistic symbolic drama with a cast of four and an audience of thirteen.”