Free Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) by Darwin Porter, Danforth Prince Page B

Lana would be appearing in her next picture. Louis B. Mayer announced that Marriage would be shown in “all the theaters of war around the world.”
    Tennessee was also asked to write a small prologue that Lana would deliver at the beginning of the film, a sort of morale booster for the troops. He jokingly told friends, “In it, I’m going to suggest that both Lana and I will be waiting to service the returning troops. I’ll meet them on the piers of San Francisco.”
    Each day Tennessee struggled with the script, not finding it “my kind of story.” He grew so frustrated trying to write it that he once said, “I can almost hope that Lana will die in childbirth.” [The star was pregnant at the time.]
    Late one morning, the lesbian film editor, Jane Loring, showed up unannounced at his little office. She told him that she was assisting Berman in producing Marriage . She’d come to check on the script to see if he were progressing properly. “Pandro wants me to help you invent some sexy situations that will pass the blue-nosed censors of the Hays audience.”
    Loring wore white flannel pants, a beret, and large sunglasses—very mannish attire. “She did not conceal the fact that she was a lesbian, but didn’t hide it either,” Tennessee later said. “I’d heard rumors that she was the lover of Katharine Hepburn. My suspicion was confirmed when she invited me to lunch in the commissary with Hepburn herself.”

    Katharine Hepburn
    In the commissary, Hepburn arrived thirty minutes late and was introduced to Tennessee. “Back then I think she regarded me as a little minnow in a fast-flowing stream. They spent most of the luncheon talking to each other about difficult plights of women in film.”
    When the subject of Lana Turner came up, Hepburn flashed anger.
    “That god damn bottle of bleach practically threw herself at Spencer when they made that movie,” Hepburn said.
    She was referring to the 1941 release of Dr . Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , starring Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman, and Lana.
    The irony of Hepburn’s snub of Tennessee was that he would one day create two of her most memorable roles—that of Violet Venable in Suddenly Last Summer and that of Amanda in the television version of The Glass Menagerie .
    He chose not to mention her brilliant portrayals in his memoirs, referring to Hepburn only once, and not in a very flattering way. “Has anyone ever understood the gallantry and charm of old ladies, in and out of the theater, as well as Giraudoux in The Madwoman of Chaillot?” he wrote. “Kate Hepburn was just not old enough or mad enough to suggest the charisma of their lunacy.”
    On another hot afternoon, Tennessee got to meet the love goddess herself, Lana Turner, who called on him at his office. She was obviously very pregnant.
    Instead of discussing the script with him, she poured out her marriage woes. “I should say her ‘lack of marriage’ woes,” he said.
    In July of 1942, she’d married a handsome, unemployed young man of whom she knew little. As she explained to Tennessee, she didn’t know that he had been previously married.
    She suggested that, “My personal situation might be an interesting plot device to enliven Marriage Is a Private Affair .”
    She explained that Stephen Crane’s divorce from his first wife, Carol Kurtz, had not become final at the time of her marriage, and as a means of avoiding charges of bigamy, she was going to have to seek an annulment. “That seems like a respectable way out of the mess,” he told her.
    “No, it’s more complicated than that,” she said. “I don’t know if I want to re-marry Steve just to legitimize my unborn child. When I told that to Steve, he went crazy. That night, he drove his car over the cliff above where I was living, hoping his car would crash into my house on the way down. But the thick underbrush on the hill brought his car to a halt. Perhaps you could also work that actual event into a plot device for Marriage . In