Each summer they daydreamed of the farm, and each September, when the time came for Frank to book the tickets to the next place, the new city—Berlin, Amsterdam, Lisbon—they found it impossible to resist the lure of those unspoiled streets, those secret bars, those operas and beaches and parks and alleyways. The daydream was never enough. Frank longed for the next place as much—maybe more—than Tenn did. And then, once they grew tired of the next place, as they always did, they longed for Duncan Street, the closest place they’d had to a home.
“I think I would have been happy on the farm,” Frank said.
“Which farm is that, Frankie?”
“The farm in Sicily.”
Tenn thought a moment. “Oh yes—our little paradiso with the geese and the goats and the young gardener-chauffeur.”
“And the lake nearby for swimming,” Frank said. “It was a good plan.”
“It was,” said Tenn.
“I’d have gotten along good with the geese and the goats.”
“Not to mention the young gardener-chauffeur,” Tenn said, with a laugh. “There’s his cousin Raffaelo right there!” He pointed, discreetly, to a teenage boy carrying a soccer ball. “What do you think of him?”
Frank said he did not want to think of Raffaelo.
“You get along with everyone,” Tenn said. “Even that awful nurse.”
“She’s not so bad,” said Frank. “She’s just doing her job.”
“See what I mean?”
“I think I was cut out for the domestic life,” Frank said. “More than . . . We should have stayed in one place, maybe, for more than a few months.”
“We had Duncan Street.”
“For a while.”
“I don’t want to fight with you, Frankie.”
He had no fight in him, either. He watched young Raffaelo try to bounce the soccer ball from knee to knee. The kid had no talent for it. The ball kept hitting him in the face or sailing into the grass. His feet weren’t quick enough. He was leaning too far forward.
“I’ll take my cigarette now,” Frank said.
“Are you sure you can handle it?”
“No.”
But he could. The smoke was so much sweeter than the air. His chest swelled with the pleasures of it, its invigorating rush, the tingle on his lips. Just this morning, he was alone on his hospital bed too tired to read the cards that came for him. He was fiddling with the tubes in his nose, trying to get more air that wasn’t coming. Something was wrong. And then, or so Tenn told him, he was gasping like a hooked fish. Those words spoken in Tenn’s voice, that image of how he’d found him when, finally, he’d shown up to pay his respects, stuck in Frank’s mind. A hooked fish. He could taste the metal on his tongue, the blood from the gash in his lip. Now the smoke purified his mouth, his throat, his lungs, his heart. He took the smoke into him in precious sips. Any more and he’d choke.
They passed the cigarette back and forth. It was the closest they’d come in years to a kiss.
“I went cold on you,” Frank said. “After Senso. I want you to know you didn’t imagine it.”
“It never once occurred to me that I imagined it,” Tenn said.
“Was I so obvious?”
“After all this time, Frankie, you still don’t know how transparent you are. It’s one of your finest qualities, your absence of artifice. The sincerity of your rages and affections. It’s what’s always attracted me to men from the sunburnt countries.” He laughed. “You boys think you’re hiding something, but whatever it is you’re attempting to conceal is as plain as your Roman nose.”
“I’d have made a terrible actor, is what you’re saying.”
“Frankie, that’s not—”
“I’m trying to say I’m sorry,” he said.
He couldn’t bear to hear what Tenn might be tempted to say next: that Frank would have made a fine leading man, that he’d needed just one more lucky break, that he should have stayed in closer touch with Anja, that he’d have gladly intervened again if Frank had only swallowed his pride and asked. All of this had run through Frank’s own mind over the years since Venice. “Visconti tossed me aside like I was a nothing,” he said now. “Even having you as my—patron—wasn’t enough to keep me in his film. That’s what a nothing I was. But I didn’t blame him. I didn’t even blame myself. I blamed you.”
“You talk of this blame as if it’s news to me.”
“Nothing is ever news to you. Maybe that’s why I stopped talking.”
“You gave up so easily, Frankie. After making such a fuss about Senso, you let it defeat you, like you didn’t want it much anyway. Like acting was just another plan—like your play, and your dancing, like Anja—another dress shirt you were fitting yourself for. And now you tell me that wasn’t the life you wanted after all, that you’d have been happier on a farm we invented after too much Margaux and kif. And I suppose you blame me for that, too. For the farm that never was.”
“I did,” said Frank. “But I don’t anymore.”
“Well, call that news, then.”
“You don’t understand,” said Frank. “You’ve been gone—off in Virginia, on the town with Angel, wherever it is you go now—and I’ve been back there, back in that time. Because that’s what the guys in the ward told me to do, to put myself in my body back when it was strongest. The most healthy. Happiest. Putting myself in my body was supposed to give me energy. It was supposed to give me my fight back. It worked for them, they said. For me, though, it made everything worse. The pain, the fatigue, the soreness in my bones. It made me miss you. It made me call out your name when I should have been cursing it. So I tried to take myself out of that body, but I couldn’t; once I was back there, I couldn’t let it go. I didn’t want to let it go. Those months after Truman’s party. Rome and Livorno and Vicenza and Venice. Waiting for Visconti to call. The three of us on the Lido. The acqua alta. I was at the beginning of something. I used to thank Anja for putting me there. And Truman. Even Sandro and Jack. I used to thank Jack for dying in front of me. It woke me up.”
“You thanked everyone but me.”
“Isn’t that how it goes?”
“Not always.”
“Well—” Frank said.
If he were to script the moment to say the words—I love you, Tenn—finally, to his face, in a way that convinced him that he meant them, and always had, wouldn’t it be now? Like the aria Maria Callas might sing at the end of the opera, just before she plunges the dagger in. Like Maggie the Cat in the upstairs room as the curtain slowly falls. But to say the words here, under the swaying sycamores, in the first hours of Indian Summer, after fifteen years of holding them back, was the same as giving up. He wasn’t ready.
For months, Frank had been burning terror like fuel. Terror had given him the energy to go back and forth from Key West to New York, from the apartment to the hospital. Terror burned slower, colder, than fury had. He felt himself coming to the end of the terror, just as he’d once come to the end of the fury. What was next? What came after terror? Ecstasy? Not yet. Between now and the final brightness, he needed something else to live on. He chose the words, the ones he knew, as surely as his Roman nose, Tenn most wanted to hear, the ones he’d flown back from Virginia desperate for, the ones he’d written for his leading ladies but could never write for him.
“I’m thanking you now,” Frank said. He meant it tenderly, but it didn’t come off. Might as well have another storm, then, for old times’ sake. So he said, “You showed up in time for that, at least.”
* * *
• • •
HE DIDN’T REMEMBER how he made it back to his room. Did Nurse Fig come to claim him from the park? Did he zip down the hallways again, in and out of the elevator, slaloming the abandoned gurneys? For the third time that day, he woke to Tenn beside him in the chair, those chubby fingers clasped over his.
; The shadow of fear covered every wall now. People came in and out, whispering. His mother smoothed his sweaty hair. He had crisp new sheets. The stack of machines blinked and sighed. The tank fed him the purest of air. But the shadow never moved.
Again the room began to fill with water. Again Frank stood, scared, surging with purpose, threw the covers off the bed, and swam toward the door. Again, the moment he sat in the chair to rest, the water choked his lungs, and he forced himself to jump up and swim back to the bed, and then back to the chair, and then to the bed again.
This went on and on. It was more difficult than it had been before to move his arms. His stride was slower. The wooden slats in the back of the chair dug into the knobs of his spine. The new sheets burned his skin. He lifted his arms and legs to cool them. His gown covered almost nothing. He felt ashamed, obscene.
“Frankie, try to lie still,” said Tenn.
“I’m too restless,” he said.
He had to swim again. But when he planted his palms on the mattress to lift himself, his wrists collapsed. Explosions everywhere. He fell back onto the bed. The end of Indian Summer already, so soon.
“Those visitors tired you out,” Tenn said.
“I’m glad they’re gone,” said Frank, closing his eyes.
“And the park tired you out.”
“Yes.”
“And me.”
“A little,” he said. Teasing. Could Tenn see the smile on his face? The bombs kept going off, two and three at a time now, pulverizing his bones. He let go of Tenn’s hand. He turned on his side away from him. When he woke next, he didn’t want the shadow to be the first thing he saw, even if it was attached to Tenn.
“Frankie, do you want me to leave you now?” he asked.
He did not. He never had. Still, they’d left each other again and again. They rarely asked permission. They simply declared their leave-taking, and the next morning they woke in some other place. They kept their lives pleasantly separate, as they expected two men might need and want to do. It still had no name, the nature of their long association, their fifteen years—a lifetime!—of trips and plans and nightingales and cautious public affections. Maybe it never would. Maybe they invented it. Was Frank really cut out for the domestic life, or would he have always longed for the stars? How astonishing that he still didn’t know, that he was as much a stranger to himself on this last day as he’d been that night on the porch of the Atlantic House.
“Frankie, do you want me to leave you now?” Tenn asked again.
“No,” he said. He did not. He never had. Not in Rome, not on Duncan Street, not these last weeks in New York when he’d been back in his body, strong as a horse, and all the boys were looking their way.
“No,” Frank said again. “I’m used to you.”
A NOTE TO THE READER
I first met Frank Merlo in the pages of Dotson Rader’s memoir, Tennessee: Cry of the Heart, which I picked up on a whim at a used bookstore in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1997. I remember standing in the aisle of the store reading about this working-class gay Italian guy from New Jersey who’d been the lover of Tennessee Williams, and who died at forty after days of waiting for one last visit from the great writer with whom he’d spent most of his adult life. There I was, a twenty-five-year-old working-class gay Italian guy from Delaware with dreams of being a writer myself, feeling an instant kinship—which eventually became an obsession—with both men: the neurotic and ambitious Tenn and the steadfast and searching Frank. I knew I wanted to write about these guys, but I didn’t yet know how.
The book, later a film, that taught me I could write fiction about real people was Christopher Bram’s Gods and Monsters, an interpretation of the last days of James Whale, director of Frankenstein. My first attempt at such “alternative history fiction,” as it’s come to be called, was the short story “The Last Days of Tennessee,” which, despite multiple revisions, went nowhere, and caused me to abandon the notion of making Merlo and Williams into fictional characters. I kept in touch with them over the next twelve years, though: As I wrote novels about other people, I read and reread Williams’s work and the numerous biographies and tell-alls about him and his time with Merlo, continually struck by the fact that it was during the “Frankie Years”—roughly 1947 to 1963—that Williams wrote all of his major plays after Streetcar. Once Frank was gone, Williams descended into what he called in his Memoirs “a seven-year depression,” though, in truth, those bluest of devils stuck around until his death in 1983, and during those twenty years he never wrote another truly great play. I kept asking myself, what was the alchemy between these two very different men that produced such transcendent classics as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer, The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real, and others? How must it have been for Frank to live in the shadow of that genre-defining artist, playing his supporting role, deferring his own dreams? I kept looking for a way to dramatize their long association in narrative, to write into the fictional spaces between what was “known” about them, not only to explore the particular dynamic between Frank Merlo and Tennessee Williams, but to discover something—I still wasn’t sure what—about relationships in general.
Ultimately, it was a letter—more accurately, a series of letters—that provided the way in.
The first of these letters was from Williams to Elia Kazan, sent from Barcelona in July 1953:
I had to leave Rome [for Spain] as Frank’s behavior toward me became almost insufferable. He seemed to be playing Bubu de Montparnasse and to expect me to accept the role of one of Bubu’s less satisfactory whores. . . . Then I had it out with him, verbally, and flew to Barcelona the next day. . . . He is sunk into such a pit of habit and inertia and basic contempt for himself or his position in life which I think he, consciously or unconsciously, holds me responsible for and almost if not quite hates me for. That old cocksucker Wilde uttered a true thing when he said, Each man kills the thing he loves. The killing is not voluntary but we sure in hell do it. And burn for it. I have given up faith in happy solutions to problems between two people but I shall try to think of something just the same and to work it out if it can be this coming year. . . . And maybe it will all clear up again as it has before and we’ll go right along as we have been going. So far I haven’t thought of anything else.
Williams returned from this fateful trip to Barcelona in late July, but he makes no journal entries during the period in Rome between “circa Tuesday 28 July or Wednesday, 29 July 1953” and “Friday, 7 August 1953”; during that time, it is entirely conceivable that he and Merlo could have accepted the invitation from Truman Capote to visit him in Portofino. Williams references Capote’s recent invitation in a letter to Maria Britneva, mostly to complain about Truman’s explicit exclusion of their beloved dog, Mr. Moon.
These letters got Frank and Tenn to the party, but I didn’t know who they’d meet there, or what that “missing” weekend, smack in the middle of a stormy summer, might reveal to me. I’d been a longtime fan of John Horne Burns’s novel, The Gallery, and I knew that not only had he taken up with an Italian doctor named Sandro Nencini in Florence around that time, but that he died under mysterious circumstances ten days later. We know that Jack sent a letter to his mother dated 5 August 1953 from Marina di Cecina, but there is no evidence that he and Sandro did not take a turn northward up the Ligurian coast to Portofino during their documented road trip from Florence to Livorno in that same span of days—and so to Truman’s party I sent them as well.
I thought four leading men might be enough for one book, but then I came upon the June 1953 letter from Truman Capote to David O. Selznick, an excerpt from which appears as an epigraph to the novel. Capote’s throwaway scrap of gossip about the scandalous mother-daughter duo in Portofino that same summer stuck with me, but I wasn’t sure what, if anything, to do with it until, quite by chance, I met a certain legendary actress at a dinner party. An impromptu conversation with this actress, who is
also an accomplished director—one in which we discussed the particular loneliness of life in Boston, the art of fiction itself, and a memorable encounter she had with Tennessee Williams and his dog in a hotel lobby in Paris—inspired me to invent the characters of Anja and Bitte Blomgren. Ironically, it was only after the entirely fictional Anja entered the narrative that the plot began to take shape, and that I was able both to imagine more fully Frank’s inner life and to venture an answer as to how “each man kills the thing he loves.” As a character, Anja started out as a potential muse for Tenn, but the more I got to know her, the more I saw that she belonged to Frank. Somehow, by another strange alchemy, watching Anja struggle with fame in her final years taught me something about how Frank struggled in his short life with the anxieties of anonymity.
I have researched the lives and work of Tennessee Williams (1911–1983), Frank Merlo (1922–1963), Truman Capote (1924–1984), and John Horne Burns (1916–1953) in an attempt to deepen my understanding of them, but my goal for Leading Men was neither to reproduce what is “known” about them nor to put forth any divergent theories. I have made every effort to stay true to the locations and dates in which the real-life versions of these characters lived and traveled, taking no deliberate liberties for the sake of convenience or dramatic effect.
While some significant figures have been omitted—most notably Maria Britneva, who accompanied Williams and Merlo to Verona to work on the Senso script—to the best of my ability, I have not allowed anyone who couldn’t possibly have been in a scene to make an appearance. According to Burns biographer David Margolick, Sandro Nencini died in 2005 in Italy, leaving behind at least one child. He, too, is my own interpretation and invention.
On the twenty-year journey from that used bookstore in Wilmington to the novel you now hold in your hands, I was guided by multiple signs and chance encounters (meeting Liv Ullmann being just one of them) that helped convince me I was on the right track. On a trip to Italy many years ago, my partner and I spent a happy weekend at the Hotel Opera in Rome; only later, upon reading the letters Williams sent in the summer of 1953, did the street address of that hotel stand out: 11 Via Firenze, the very same walls of Frank and Tenn’s apartment. St. Stephen’s Church in Boston, which I still pass every day on my walk to the grocery store, turned out to be the site of John Horne Burns’s memorial service (which only four people attended). Most spookily: During my interview in Chicago with Tony Narducci, the man who calls himself “the last living lover of Tennessee Williams,” a full decade after I’d written what became Call It Joy, he told me the story of meeting a drunk and despondent Williams at the Monster Discotheque in Key West in 1982, where the first words Williams spoke to him were that he was a dead ringer for a young Frank Merlo. It was Tony’s resemblance to Frank that prompted Williams to invite Tony back to his house that night, and then the two men spent six more months together.
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