La Dolce Vita-Senior Set-Tennessee Williams’ “The Roman Spring Of Mrs. Stone” (1961)-A Film Review         

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, starring Vivian Leigh, Warren Beatty, from the play by Tennessee Williams, 1961

The playwright Tennessee Williams was a hard fought acquired taste for me. Hard fought since the subject matter, or subplot anyway, of many of his most famous works revolved around homosexuality even if in a somewhat muted manner reflecting those harsh times when sodomy was on the criminal law books and everybody stayed at least publically in the closet, deep in the closet in the case of one of my hometown hang-out corner boys Timmy Riley, oddness and off-beat-ness in general, loneliness and assorted despairs. Back to that hard fought part though when I first read I think the play Suddenly Last Summer and then saw the film starring Kate Hepburn, Liz Taylor and Monty Clift I was put off by the insinuated homosexual procuring process which was behind the storyline. Kate as mother procuress and Liz as “bait” for the boys.

Reason: well, reason which even Timmy Riley claimed to understand when he hung around with us. “Fags,” guys light on their feet that kind of were nothing but subject matter for verbal abuse, fights and endless baiting. It was sometime after Stonewall in 1969, a few years later, when Allan Jackson found out that Timmy was gay, and was also doing a drag queen act in Frisco where he fled to when his parents essentially disowned him after he told them about his sexual preferences. (WFT, Timmy had been the lead guy when we went down drunk as skunks to eternally gay-friendly Provincetown with the specific purpose of gay-baiting some poor sap in order to beat him up. What awful stuff Timmy must have gone through since he later told Allan he knew his was gay from about thirteen). That and Scribe finally telling us we had been dead ass wrong about those fights and that bear-baiting we indulged in on the corner.

 

That was when I went all out to check out Tennessee Williams after seeing The Glass Menagerie on the stage at I think the ART in Cambridge. Funny the more I checked on Williams the more I found out that half the literary figures, or so it seemed, were gay or lesbian. Guys like Walt Whitman, Auden, Allan Ginsberg (although I knew he was gay before vaguely from when Scribe would recite Howl to us and almost get murdered for it, not because of the homosexuality but because we could have given a fuck about such stuff when we were hanging out Friday nights girl   dateless).         

I may have read the offering here The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone in play form but I don’t remember it so this is my first take on his take of the underside of the ex-pat community, the well-heeled single older women part, in Rome in the post-World War II la dolce vita world of those lonely, worried types who need plenty of assurance that they still had “it,” still had sex appeal of one form or another. Take the lead character Karen Stone, played by Vivian Leigh who was facing her own battle as a fading actress after her legendary performance as Scarlett  O’Hara in Gone With The Wind, she Karen of the famed legitimate theater, the Broadway white lights when that meant something. Her latest effort, a run at Shakespeare’s As You Like It trying to play the young queen type was in her mind a bust. Friends were publicly more generous but among themselves knew the thing was a stinker. That led to her closing the play and taking off for parts unknown with her ill husband. During the trip there he had a heart attack and died leaving Karen to face the future alone.

Karen went into exile in Rome after that in order to as she said “drift.” But drifting only goes so far for a still young senior set denizen. Of course in those days proper and rich women left by themselves didn’t go to the Yellow Pages looking for companionship or go to get picked up in a bar. It was all done through various nefarious upscale native connections but in the end there was no dearth of poor beautiful young men to “escort” milady-for a fee one way or another usually with “gifts” or expense accounts. That was how Mrs. Stone met Paolo, played by a very young Warren Beatty. The duel here is between Paolo’s alleged sensibilities about Karen and her fending him off as another gigolo- for a while. But soon the inevitable expense account gets established and she plays his bills. Problem or rather two problems, one, Paolo is a whore and goes after a young American actress and two, on the rebound of sorts, Karen goes the go with another beautiful young man who has been stalking her. We are left with some serious doubts about what will happen with that young man who looks like he could murder her and not give a damn about the consequences. Pure Tennessee.