A novella approach

Tennessee Williams never intended to write “The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone” as a novella back in 1950. It only found life in print after Greta Garbo reaffirmed that she did, indeed, want to be alone.

The playwright had been collecting ideas for a prospective comeback vehicle for the legendary film star, who had retired from Hollywood in 1941 after her disastrous comedy “Two-Faced Women.”

But Williams picked probably the worst story idea to lure the reclusive Garbo, then in her mid-40s, back to the screen. He wanted the Swedish sex symbol to play a widowed, aging actress whose career and life go into a tailspin when she falls for a young Italian lothario. Garbo turned Williams down. In fact she turned down every offer to return to the screen.

“He had all of his notes he had written to present to her as a kind of treatment,” says Robert Allan Ackerman, the director of Showtime’s new movie version of “Roman Spring,” which can be seen next Sunday. “He just expanded it a bit and turned it into a novella.”

That “Roman Spring” is being adapted and revived is in keeping with Hollywood’s unabating desire to regularly reconsider his body of works. Starting with his first theatrical hit, “The Glass Menagerie” in 1945 and including “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” Williams has been perhaps second only to Shakespeare as a favorite for films as well as TV.

But it was different with “Roman Spring,” which was not a play and never acquired the notoriety and visibility of his hit plays. It was 11 years after publication that “Roman Spring” made it to the big screen.

The story has all the ingredients found in Williams’ best plays: a fragile heroine who enters into an ill-fated relationship with a younger man.

Karen Stone is an aging actress whose older, richer husband has bankrolled her career, even convincing her to star in a production of “Romeo and Juliet.” The reviews are scathing. After the show’s quick demise, Karen and her ailing husband take a trip to Italy. In the poverty-stricken post-World War II Rome, the couple meet the Contessa, a cunning, manipulative woman who presides over a stable of young men whom she matches with lonely women.

When her husband dies of heart attack, Karen decides to stay in Rome. Adrift and in shock at the loss of her husband, she contacts the Contessa, who introduces her to a group of handsome gigolos, most notably the Contessa’s favorite, the handsome Paolo. Karen quickly takes to the charming young man, who sexually awakens her.

Paolo also starts to fall in love with her and doesn’t seem to mind that Karen doesn’t lavish presents and money upon him. But this being vintage Williams, the relationship soon falters and Karen finds herself even more vulnerable and depressed.

The 1961 version received very mixed reviews from the critics. Vivien Leigh, who had won an Oscar a decade earlier as Blanche DuBois in “Streetcar,” was particularly faulted for failing to capture Karen’s pathos.

Warren Beatty, in one of his first films roles, proved he was no master of accents as the gigolo Paolo, though German actress Lotte Lenya received a best supporting actress nomination for her role as the Contessa.

Closer to the original

The Showtime adaptation, penned by playwright Martin Sherman (“Bent”), is much closer to Williams’ original novella. Helen Mirren stars as Karen; Olivier Martinez of “Unfaithful” is Paolo; and Anne Bancroft is the Contessa. Brian Dennehy plays Karen’s rich husband and Rodrigo Santoro plays a mysterious, homeless young man who tracks Karen’s every move.

“Martin Sherman’s adaptation is so much closer to the novella because it takes place in 1950 right after World War II,” says Ackerman. In the original film, the action unfolded in 1961, when the Italian economy was on the upswing.

“In this version,” says Ackerman, “the Italians, rather than just coming across as evil, decadent European aristocracy, you really understand what is driving them: poverty. They lost their money and they have deep anti-American feelings. All of that seemed to be incredibly relevant. It gave the entire piece a much more political, social point of view.”

Jerry Offsay, president of programming for Showtime, said he quickly green-lighted the project when executive producer Hilary Heath approached him.

“I knew the original movie had a very famous cast and that it was very lightly regarded, very flawed and therefore it was an opportunity to try to improve upon the original,” says Offsay. Of the project’s sometimes difficult Rome production, he added: “They survived threatened strikes and boycotts and all sorts of bits of drama there, but it gives it the authenticity that it needed. They wanted to live up to the material and they wanted to say that this is what Tennessee Williams is about, not that other very flawed movie.”

Both Mirren and Ackerman point out that there is a lot of Williams in the character of Karen Stone.

“He is talking about himself to a great extent,” says the actress. “He was putting himself in all of these great female characters, which is why the characters are so complex and so pathetic and understandable. He understands them because he is writing about himself.”

“He said at some point that it was the most critical autographical portrait of [himself],” adds Ackerman. “It is amazing to me that he had the foresight and the knowledge, and that is the greatness of Williams -- the incredible sensitivity to understand so much about life and even at a certain age to understand the grieving process.

“I think so much about what happens to her is as a result of losing her husband, the losses in her life, the loss of her career, the loss of her youth and menopause,” Ackerman says. “She is in a stage of incredible grief. I think accompanying that kind of grief is often the panic and anxiety that leads to the coupling of one’s self with very undesirable people because the need to fill the void is so great and one isn’t always discriminating about how one fills that void.”

Throughout his career, Williams culled his life for subjects and themes for his plays. In fact, director Elia Kazan said, “Everything in his life is in his plays, and everything in his plays is in his life.”

Born in 1911 in Mississippi, Williams’ early life was filled with tension. His parents, a shoe salesman and a minister’s daughter, would erupt into violent outbursts that often frightened his shy sister, Rose, who became the model for Laura in “The Glass Menagerie.”

After seeing a production of Ibsen’s “Ghosts” while attending the University of Missouri, he decided to become a playwright. His dream, though, was interrupted when his father forced him to leave school and work for a shoe company. It was while working there he met a man named Stanley Kowalski who would turn up years later in “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

He eventually returned to school, and two plays, “Candles to the Sun” and “The Fugitive Kind,” were produced in St. Louis in 1937. Two years later, he received a Rockefeller Grant and a year later his first play as a professional playwright, “Battle of Angels,” was produced in Boston. In 1945, “The Glass Menagerie” premiered to great reviews on Broadway. And until the early ‘60s, he was one of Broadway’s brightest lights.

Williams, who finally embraced his homosexuality in his late 30s, fell in love with Frank Merlo in 1947 while living in New Orleans. Merlo, like so many of Williams’ characters, was an Italian American who was a steadying influence on Williams’ life. When Merlo died in 1961, Williams, much like Karen Stone, went into a deep depression for 10 years and thought he would go insane as his sister did. He died in 1983 after choking on a bottle cap.

The new “Roman Spring” is far more sexually explicit than the original. Mirren, who has never been shy about doing nude scenes during her 30-year-plus film career, has several nude love scenes with an equally undraped Martinez. “Times have changed so much in the last 40 years that sexually the screen has become so much more permissive that what you can show and what you can allude to you can actually graphically depict,” says Ackerman. “It’s much more sophisticated and graphic now.”

Mirren had just finished playing another ill-fated Williams heroine in a revival of “Orpheus Descending” on the London stage when she agreed to play Karen. The Emmy Award-winning British actress (“Prime Suspect”) had found the original film, “drab and very un-Tennessee Williams and just not very good.” She adds she wouldn’t have taken the project if the film had been a classic.

Martinez shied away from seeing the original film because he didn’t want to be influenced by it. “But I did read the novel,” says the French actor, “because I knew this movie was very, very close to the novel.”

Screenwriter Sherman, Mirren says, had the poetic and theatrical sensibilities to successfully adapt Williams’ novella. “It’s very difficult to do an adaptation of Tennessee Williams because he is such a great writer and poet,” she says. “You need someone who is just not a run-of-the-mill screenwriter. You need someone with that theatrical understanding and not make it static and allow the undercurrent to work out.”

Though most of Williams’ best work was written more than 40 years ago, it all seems highly contemporary. “Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone,” says Ackerman, is no exception.

“You walk around Los Angeles and every single woman her age has been lifted, pulled and tucked, and they aren’t even actresses. There is this terror of getting old, of becoming old. It’s frightening.”

*

‘The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone’

When: Next Sunday, 8 p.m.

Channel: Showtime

Rating: The network has rated the film TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children younger than 17).

Cast: Helen Mirren, Olivier Martinez, Anne Bancroft