HOTEL MOVIE CLUB: Lizard Brain

On "Night of the Iguana," Tennessee Williams, Liz and Dick, the ruining of Puerto Vallarta, reptiles in captivity, and why you should never make Bette Davis angry

Hello valued guests,

Thank you all, again, for checking into Hotel Movie Club, and for coming to our second lobby social last Wednesday night (the Mr. Hulot discord was a gorgeous and peaceful scene indeed -- and if you need the Discord link again to join us, it's here). 

Tonight, we travel to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, for John Huston’s 1964 drama “The Night of the Iguana.” Below is an (admittedly too long!) introduction to some of the theme’s films and very gossipy backstory. Sorry for sending this one so late! Enjoy, get your popcorn ready, and see you in the Discord in a few hours.

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There are two hotels, three men, and four women at the heart of “Night of the Iguana,” though one of the hotels is fake, one of the men was in the midst of a crisis, and the woman who was primarily responsible for the film’s success did not even act in it. There was so much drama swirling around “The Night of the Iguana,” both during shooting and during the original theatrical release, that the drama in the film seemed almost like a hat on a hat. Who needs to see a fictional threesome with a naughty priest when you have real-life adulterous movie stars and a washed-up bombshell aching for a comeback and a grand dame of the theater and an in-demand teenage starlet and a heartbroken playwright and a cigar-chomping director all cavorting around a sleepy Mexican beach town for the paparazzi? And you thought that “Don’t Worry, Darling” had on-set intrigue. “Don’t Worry, Darling” wishes, frankly. I could write ten pages about all this! I could write a hundred! But I’ll try to keep it brief. 

So! Before we dive into everything happening in the background of this wild ride of a major motion picture, here is a bit of context for the film itself. “The Night of the Iguana” began its life as a Broadway play written by the great bard of rum-soaked American desperation, Tennessee Williams. It is not technically Williams’ last play, but it was his last hit. His career went downhill after this one, with distressing speed. But for a while, in 1961, he was still the toast of New York. After a very messy out of town try-out (more on that in a moment), it opened on Broadway at the Royale Theater (now the Bernard B. Jacobs) to raves. “Time” magazine put Williams on the cover, and wrote that “Iguana served to bracket the whole range of Williams’s achievement, a body of work so substantial that it now casts a larger shadow than the man who made it.” 

What the reviews did not say is that the production was…troubled, and from the very beginning. Writing the play was a particularly torturous process for Williams, who was, when he began working on it in 1959, in the throes of an off-again-on-again love affair with Frank Merlo, a ruggedly handsome working-class Italian American that Williams met while vacationing one summer in Provincetown. Merlo, who Williams’ biographer John Lahr described as a “high-spirited Sicilian,” was twenty-five when Williams met him; Williams was thirty-seven, and devastated by Merlo’s beauty. Williams wrote in his memoirs of their first meeting: “he leaned smoking against the porch railing and he was wearing Levis and I looked and looked at him. My continual and intense scrutiny must have burned through his shoulders, for after a while he turned toward me and grinned.” The dime store novel energy this has!!! I’m telling you, I could write a hundred pages about all of the twists and turns here!!!! But we aren’t even to the play yet. We have to keep it moving. (If you do want to read more about Williams and Merlo, you can pick up a beautiful novel called “Leading Men” in which Christopher Castellani imagines their life together all across Europe; if you love “The Beautiful Ruins,” this will be your new favorite book). 

By the time Williams started writing the short story that would become the one-act that would become the three-act that would become the big Hollywood movie “The Night of the Iguana,” he and Merlo had been dating for eleven years, and their romance had hit a rocky patch. Tenn was unraveling a bit. One of his friends remembered that while he was writing “Iguana,” he would regularly go to the bathroom where he “knelt beside the bathtub and prayed to God” to get him through the day and to keep him sane long enough to finish his work without absolutely flipping out. There is a lot of flipping out in Tennessee Williams’ biography, and I do not have the time or space to really detail it here, but I HIGHLY ENCOURAGE you to pick up a copy of John Lahr’s incredible Williams biography “Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh,” which remains one of the juiciest, dishiest, most delectable and yet harrowing accounts of a life I have ever read. I lost the entire week between Christmas and New Years in 2014 to that fever dream of a book and do not regret a single second of it – it is the kind of fatty filet mignon of a biography Tennesee Williams deserves: hot-blooded, cat-scratching, marksman-like in its aim, unrelenting, and full of swishy sparkly details that make living in his brain seem much more thrilling and much more frightening than anyone could ever imagine. Get yourself a copy!!!! Honestly, I want to read it all over again. This is the kind of book that will make you gasp, even if you are not traditionally a gasper. I give it a 10 out of 10 gasp guarantee. 

 “The Night of the Iguana” is far from TW’s most famous work – that honor belongs to “Streetcar,” or perhaps “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” or, for the real psychotic-belle-on-the-loose heads out there, “Glass Menagerie.” But it is certainly one of his weirdest and most deviant efforts, and also his most Jesus-adjacent, in that it centers around a semi-defrocked priest, one Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon, who has recently had a wee nervous breakdown as a result of giving a very unpopular sermon about God being insane (as it turns out, churchgoers do not love hearing that God is nutbars). When the play opens, the Bad Reverend ends up in Acapulco, where he is working as a tour-guide and (I guess?) not reforming himself whatsoever because he is in hot water for sleeping with a sixteen-year old girl on one of his tours (to be fair, this is treated as a huge scandal and something that everyone else in the tour group finds repugnant, it is to the play’s credit that it does not treat statutory rape as a minor infraction). To get away from his misdeeds for a bit, the Rev hides out at a fleabag hotel run by one of his couple friends, and immediately sleeps with the lusty (and married) proprietress Maxine. For a man of the cloth, he sure does not understand how to keep a pair of pants buttoned.

Soon, a “chaotic spinster” named Hannah shows up with her poet grandfather in a wheelchair, and the rest of the play is a more or less a moral tale of the two older women gabbing over the course of a long night and bonding about what a terrible loser the priest is. It’s sort of like “The White Lotus,” if “The White Lotus” was the most depressing thing you’d ever seen? Some other things happen, like some Germans on the tour sing some bigoted songs for comic relief (the fact that Nazi songs serve as the comic relief in this play should tell you a little bit about ole’ Tennessee’s mindset when he was writing it) and some local boys tie up an iguana on a chain next to the hotel just for the sheer cruelty of it. To nobody’s surprise, this reptile on a string becomes a potent metaphor, and it offers the actor playing Shannon a real scenery-chewing monologue at the end of the play where he cries out “See? The iguana? At the end of its rope? Trying to go on past the end of its goddam rope? Like you! Like me!” (How many eighteen year olds have auditioned for Juilliard with this speech, I wonder, and how hilarious must it be to watch them try to channel the hideous pathos of a middle-aged fallen priest when their most recent credit was Nicely Nicely in “Guys and Dolls”?). 

A lot was going on with Williams while he was readying the play for its Broadway turn. For one thing, he and Merlo had a dog together, a moody black Belgian Shepherd that they adopted in Rome and named Satan (foreshadowing alert). Merlo and Williams were in the middle of a major squabble when they brought Satan up north from Key West to Detroit, where the out-of-town run was happening, and one night Satan completely flipped out (see: more flipping out) and attacked Williams as he was heading to get into bed with Merlo. According to Lahr, the dog “bit both of his ankles to the bone” and was about to rip out Williams’ throat when Merlo finally got the dog off of him. Williams took this all as a sign that Merlo was malevolent in some way (I think it’s more of a sign that you should never name a dog Satan) and began to spiral further. But Satan was, incredibly, not the biggest bitch of the Detroit run – director Frank Corsaro had convinced an older, irascible Bette Davis to play Maxine, and from the beginning the casting was a disaster. Davis sold tickets, but she was a nightmare in rehearsals. From Lahr:

Behind her back, the whole cast started calling her “La Davis” and “Jessica Dragonet” (a real burn in 1960) and Davis continued to isolate herself from the group, missing rehearsals and quitting and throwing tantrums demanding that the leading man, Patrick O’Neal, be fired. Sometimes she would sit out a performance and have her assistant count how many people asked for their money back, just to throw the numbers in the producers’ faces. Williams and Corsaro were losing hair over her antics, but due to her commercial pull, they begged her to stay just long enough to open on Broadway. She made it there, barely, and she was, naturally, great. But she quit after three months, giving a next-level passive-aggressive speech on stage to the entire cast in which she said, “I’m sorry I had to irritate you for so long with my professionalism. You obviously like doing it your way much better.” Shelley Winters bravely took up the part, but the show closed a few months later. After the play ended, Davis took out this ad for herself in Variety. You simply must hand it to this woman.

So that’s the play. The movie, the one you are about to see, has an equally wild backstory, so let’s move this tour right along. The film sticks quite closely to the play’s plot, though Huston convinced Williams to let him make some heavy edits for time. But all the elements are there: the defrocked priest (Richard Burton), the teenage girl he engages in a very illegal affair (Sue Lyon, fresh off of playing a similar role in “Stanley Kubrick’s “Lolita”), the sexy hotel mistress (Ava Gardner, stepping in for Bette Davis), the sad spinster (Deborah Kerr, an elegant stage and screen veteran who flew in from her Swiss chalet to do the part), the teenage girl’s uptight lesbian chaperone (Grayson Hall, a fascinating actress from the New York City avant-garde theater scene who did a lot of Pirandello and Genet plays in Greenwich Village before trying her hand at films; she ended up getting an Oscar nomination for her role here), and the kindly poet grandfather, Nonno (the English character actor Cyril Delevanti). 

John Huston switched the film’s location from Acapulco to the far more obscure (at the time) Puerto Vallarta, which soon flooded with paparazzi. Some believe that Huston moved the shoot to Puerto Vallarta because he had property there and wanted to get into the hotel business (at last, our theme emerges) —at least that is what Howard Johns writes in his self-published – and currently free on Kindle – book “A Stolen Paradise: Greed and Glamour in the Modern Jungle,” about the making of the film; we must consider the source. What we do know is that in bringing the movie to Puerto Vallarta, Huston both invented the region as an international tourist attraction and decimated it as a peaceful village for locals. The crew descended on Puerto Vallarta for five months, and with them came hordes of press. The area was never the same (I would, by the way, watch the limited miniseries about this shoot). Huston chose to construct the fake hotel set where the film takes place about thirty minutes south of Puerto Vallarta proper in Mismaloya, a small indigenous bayside community whose name means “place to grab fish with one’s hands” in the Uzo-Aztecan dialect Nahuatl (now it is the site of several very fancy “eco-hotels” and yoga retreat centers like the $600 per night Xinalani; colonialism and wellness and privileged helicopter tourism are all wrapped up together in this narrow strip of Jalisco). Tennesee Williams joined Huston in Mismaloya early on, to make script edits and outrun his grief; in the years between the Broadway run and the film adaptation, Merlo died of lung cancer. Here is a description, from the Lahr book, of a letter Williams wrote at the time.

Ray Stark is, by the way, the film’s producer and a wild character himself. At the same time, he was producing “Funny Girl” on Broadway (and went on to produce five of Streisand’s films) and he wore giant glasses with black plastic frames and owned racehorses and collected Picassos and was a notorious Hollywood ballbuster who was about an eleven on the “is a tyrant to get things done” scale (including his tendency toward casting couch harassment, the details of which came out long after he won the Irving G. Thalberg award). Think Elliot Gould in “Ocean’s Eleven” and you’ll have the vibe. Stark and Huston flew together to Spain to convince a then-hibernating Ava Gardner to do “Iguana,” telling her it was perhaps her last chance to do a big Hollywood picture and get her top billing back after she had faded from the limelight. But Stark’s biggest power move for the production was hiring Richard Burton to play Reverend Shannon. Because when you got Burton, at least in 1963…you got Elizabeth Taylor.

Which brings us, finally, to the woman who haunts “Night of the Iguana” without ever appearing in a single frame of it, or The Liz of It All. Huston and Stark did not have the money to hire Taylor, who was coming off of “Cleopatra,” to play Maxine (Gardner was so far out of showbiz at that point I doubt she ended up costing much more than scale). They blew their topline budget on Burton, but it was really a two for one deal. The Welshman just happened to come with a side of the Most Famous Woman on Earth, which was very good news for the picture’s press agents. Liz and Dick were both married to other people when their affair began, and they were tabloid dynamite for the entire year of 1962; I would call them the Jaffleck or Brangelina of the time but this would actually be demeaning to the level of fame they amassed just by appearing on a yacht together, because there really hasn’t been anything like it before or since. They were the big celebrity news, worldwide, for an entire year, so much so that in 1962, when the “Cleopatra” cheating rumors began to swirl, some papers ran with an Elizabeth Taylor story on the front page instead of John Glenn orbiting the moon. She was bigger than the moon. 

When Burton traveled to Puerto Vallarta to film “Iguana,” Taylor came too. The gossip rags tried to make it a whole scandal about how she was worried that he would have affairs with Kerr (too graceful! Wouldn’t do it!),  Lyon (yikes, she was barely 18), or Gardner (see, this one I understand). But really, Taylor just wanted to be where Burton was, even if it was on a buggy, humid coastline that was then in the middle of nowhere. She did have certain standards, of course. The couple originally stayed at a beachside motel, but Taylor apparently had a meltdown over a flying cockroach in their room and demanded more luxurious accommodations. Knowing that he had to retain both his star and his headlines, Huston immediately gave his Puerto Vallarta villa in what was known as “Gringo Gulch” to the couple to stay in. It was called Casa Kimberly, and it is a knock-out, and it is now a bed-and-breakfast where you can stay (I promised, these letters always have a hotel in them). Here is a view of one of the villa suites:

Burton ended up buying Casa Kimberly for Taylor as a gift, and bought the house across the street for himself, and constructed a pink bridge that went between the two (name a more ideal romantic scenario, I’ll wait).

Taylor loved the compound so much that she kept going back there even after she and Burton divorced (and re-married, and split again). It was only after Burton died, at only fifty-eight years old of a cerebral hemorrhage, that Taylor stopped going back to Casa Kimberly. She tried to sell it in the 1980s – with all of her belongings still in it – for $1 million, but nobody bid on it. She ended up selling it a decade later for $475,000 in cash, to a real estate developer from California named Carolyn Holstein who promptly converted the place into a lavish B&B. In an interview with Holstein and her boyfriend in 1991, the boyfriend, a retired junior high teacher named Maurice “Maury” Mintzner, told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel that he and Holstein were “doing the Liz n’ Dick thing.” So, from the most epic Hollywood romance of the twentieth century to a guy named Maury cosplaying in a villa his girlfriend bought at half price. There is a metaphor somewhere in there. We are all iguanas at the end of our goddamn rope. 

See you tonight. 6:30PST/9:30 EST. 

Yours truly,

The Management