Geraldine Page: Every Single Thing
Excerpt from Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog
(Alfred A. Knopf)
by James Grissom
Geraldine Page was an accumulator of ideas and images and memories, and she often joked that her mind was as cluttered as her home, and both were stuffed with interesting and loved and rare things. Page hated inactivity, idle minds or chatter, conversations for which there was no point or theme or purpose. Tenn thought that she possessed, along with Marian Seldes, one of the strongest obsessions with time he had ever encountered, but [Jose] Quintero disagreed with that assessment. "She wasn't obsessed with time running out, or time having its way with her," he told me, "but she did believe that every single thing, every moment, should serve toward some bigger purpose, so she was prone to asking a room of people what they were up to, and really mean it, and really want an answer. You could have drinks and talk about things, but the conversation needed to be, had to be, intelligent and open and about something.
© 2015 James Grissom