Memoirs

by Tennessee Williams

  Diana Barrymore had wanted to play the princess in Sweet Bird in England. Well, I thought it was bad casting, I thought Diana was too much like the princess to play the princess well. She was a good friend of Marion Vaccaro and we three had stayed together at the Nacional in Cuba one time. In Cuba she didn’t drink but she smoked a lot of grass. I remember her wearing a little red lady’s riding jacket and black silk pants and one of those very crisply laundered white shirts with the black string tie. She was so striking in it with her dark hair and flashing eyes. She was very lovely.

  Anyway, we arranged for her to read for Sweet Bird but, unfortunately, what I had suspected proved to be the truth. The performance held no surprise, and I had to tell her quite frankly, “Diana, this simply isn’t your role.” I didn’t think she would take it so badly. And actually, Sweet Bird has never been done in England. Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn’t have let her do it, but I am very selfish about my work, and I didn’t want Diana to play a role that I didn’t think was suited for her. I think an author has to protect himself that way. But my telling Diana the role wasn’t for her had a terrible effect on the poor girl. She had her heart set on it, somehow, she identified with it perhaps. If I had known how fully she identified with it and how deeply her heart was set on playing it, I might have tried to do something. But I didn’t and I went south to Key West to work on something else and about a week later Diana Barrymore died. She died rather mysteriously, she went back on booze, and smoked heavy grass. In one week’s time there was a very precipitous collapse in her. It was just as though she no longer cared about living. Her manager, who found her dead one morning, said that her room was an absolute shambles, and it looked to her as if some violence had occurred. That Diana was lying naked, face down, with blood streaming out of her mouth and that there was a very heavy marble ashtray shattered against the wall and other evidence of struggle and violence. Now that mystery was not reported in the papers: the manager whispered it to me during the funeral services in New York. I’m pretty sure that, whether she had played in Sweet Bird or not, sooner or later Diana would have done the same thing, because she was a girl with talent but not enough talent and it haunted her and was destroying her. There was a sort of curse on the Barrymores, I think. Diana was a great person and a great lady, though, and I was deeply disturbed by what happened.

  Shall I attempt to entertain you, now, with my theatre or my life, assuming that there is much difference between them? I feel that I have hit the high spots among the plays, though possibly with all the grace and subtlety of a meat-ax in the hands of a butcher’s butcher!

  But I have hardly touched at all upon my prose works aside from these memoirs, and I have written a goodly quantity of prose works, some of which I prefer to my plays.

  Faye Dunaway is dedicated to the project of starring in a film based on my short story “The Yellow Bird.” She has it on a record which she has played for me twice, a record that I made for Caedmon and that is a steady seller.

  It seems to me that quite a few of my stories, as well as my one-acts, would provide interesting and profitable material for the contemporary cinema, if committed to such lovely hands as Miss Dunaway’s. Or Jon Voight’s. And to such cinematic masters of direction as Jack Clayton, who made of The Great Gatsby a film that even surpassed, I think, the novel by Scott Fitzgerald.

  But time is not on the side of anyone over thirty and I am over sixty and it is dubious that I will survive to witness these transmutations.

  It is sweetly comfortable to be back in the apartment on Dumaine Street and to find that the furniture shipped so gradually from Morgan-Manhattan Storage to New Orleans has at last arrived and been beautifully arranged. I had—with my characteristic suspicion—expected to find it all somehow sitting on the ceiling.

  So many forgotten items have reappeared!—relics of the apartments which I once had in New York, and all in surprisingly good condition. On the large walnut desk sits the brass student-lamp with its swinging globes of green-shaded glass, perfect for these old eyes at three o’clock in the morning.

  My stay in New Orleans will be very brief, only two weeks, before I set out on the wild pilgrimage to the Venice Film Festival in a planeload of such of the “beautiful people” as Andy Warhol, Joe Dallesandro, Sylvia Miles and Rex Reed, not to mention dear Billy Barnes, who has arranged the thing for me. It will be wonderful to be back on the Lido of Venice, at the stately Hotel Excelsior: the main object of the trip is to achieve a reconciliation with the raging Tartar, Maria, the Lady St. Just. After a week on the Lido, seeing the films and mingling with the beautiful people, I plan to fly down to Rome and then Taormina to swim, swim, and swim in that still fresh, cool, water with the tourists mostly gone—but, of course, that depends upon having a traveling-companion. I couldn’t hack it alone. I mostly want someone to drive me about the coastline of Sicily, searching for that mythic little farm on which to retire and raise goats and geese for what remains of my leftover life.

  I really do think that at the end of September I will come back to the States for a play production. Glenville and I had a good script session yesterday; then Glenville, after terrifying me with his statement that Genevieve Bujold had given him a terrible reading, said that he had up his sleeve a great young actor with stage experience and charisma of box-office draw, to play in The Two-Character Play (Out Cry).

  Ah, God. My life is hung on that production like a hat on a hook. It seems to be the last objective of my life in theatre, the rest of me going to Italy and into these memoirs.

  10

  The longest and most appalling tour I’ve had with a play was that interminable trek of Iguana, in 1961, beginning badly in Rochester and going on to Detroit and Cleveland and then for an excessively long stay in Chicago.

  It was highlighted, from my point of view, by the company of that huge black Belgian shepherd dog, Satin. At some point of the tour I had told Frankie that I needed the companionship of that dog and he had it shipped up from Key West

  Now it was my impression that Satin was devoted to me but this was the opposite of the fact. He used to sit directly in front of me at the Book-Cadillac Hotel in Detroit, staring into my eyes with those lovely yellow eyes of his, and occasionally sticking out his tongue to give my hand a lick. I remember that I was somewhat disconcerted by these continual attentions.

  Well, the shit hit the fan with a vengeance.

  One morning, have completed my work, I went into the bedroom, where Satin lay like a guardian by the twin bed of Frankie. As I stepped over him, to enter Frankie’s bed, he uttered a low, displeasured, in fact ominous and guttural growl; but I crawled in with Frankie.

  That night Satin attacked me with those great fangs of his.

  An idiot hotel doctor was present, he had come up to our suite to treat me for a persistent head-cold, and while he and Frankie were in the bathroom, discussing my condition, Satin sprang upon my bed and bit me clean to the bone on each ankle. He was starting for my throat when Frankie rushed out and pulled him off me.

  I said, “Frankie, turn this animal loose in the woods where he belongs.”

  Frankie said, “No, he’s better off dead.” And that morning he took Satin to the vet and had him put to sleep there.

  Since Frankie adored that dog, acquired in Rome at the advice of Magnani, the death of Satin cast a dreadful shadow over Frankie that didn’t lift during the long, long tour …

  About a week after the dogbites I discovered that my ankles had swollen up almost to the size of an elephant’s. I had been too involved in the vicissitudes of the play to notice the pain, but when I couldn’t get into my shoes, I put in a call to the fool who was the doctor. He didn’t appear until evening.

  However, he had the wit to recognize a staphylococcic infection, full blown, in both my ankles. He proceeded to fill a horse-syringe with a variety of antibiotics and to shoot me in the arm with it. I went almost immediately into a curious state. There was a blizzard in the dark outside. It was icy cold.
However, I couldn’t breathe well, and I staggered to a window and opened it wide for air.

  “My God, do you want pneumonia?” inquired that pillar of the medical profession.

  “I’d prefer it to instant suffocation,” was my furious retort.

  The doctor then summoned an ambulance and I remained gasping at the open window till it arrived. Then a couple of medics charged in with a wheel-chair, I was rushed down the freight elevator to a back entrance, laid out on a stretcher and shoved into a spectral white vehicle with a scarlet lamp on its roof. Off it rushed, siren screaming, Frankie seated gravely beside me clasping my icy hand, it was for all the world like a scene from one of those doctor serials so popular on TV.

  At the hospital I was wheeled directly to the emergency ward, a nightmarish arena for the life-death struggle, each contestant in a white canvas-curtained cubicle, separated from the sight of his fellow contestants but not from the sounds of their struggle.

  Drugs to combat the overdose of antibiotics were pumped into my blood stream: it took three hours for me to come out of shock and my panting breath to subside to more normal respiration.

  (Close shaves with death are a fascinating experience. It is especially strange how fear is eclipsed by the violence of one’s struggle to hang on: it must be very much like what gladiators felt in mortal combat at the Roman Colosseum.)

  When it was deemed possible to remove me to a hospital room above, I was rolled up to one. But there I discovered that I had no “pinkies” with me. A nurse reluctantly provided me with a half-size Seconal. I swore at her, “I can’t sleep on this and I’ve got to have sleep.” She shrugged and flounced out of the room, saying that no one just out of emergency would be given a grain and a half of Seconal. Well. There was a phone in the room and I dialed the hotel and got poor little Frankie on the phone.

  He had gone to bed after his three-hour vigil beside me in emergency, but I said, “For Christ sake, get up and run over here with my Seconal bottle.”

  I guess he was too sleepy to distinguish one bottle from another, since what he arrived with, not long after, was a bottle of diuretic pills which I was on at the time. He slammed the bottle down before I had time to recognize its contents and he dashed back out.

  Well, I want you to know that when I saw it was the wrong bottle I got out of bed, and dressed myself except for the shoes that didn’t fit over the ankles, and I started down the corridor of the hospital. On the way down the corridor, I encountered the nurse.

  “Mr. Williams,” she said, “what are you thinking of?”

  “Nothing,” I said, “but getting the fuck out of here.”

  “But, Mr. Williams, a hospital isn’t a hotel that you can check out of before we dismiss you.”

  “Fuck that, I’m dismissing myself and I only want you to get me a cab at the door.”

  Further attempts were made to restrain me. I had to summon the taxi myself. It came and I got in and went straight back to the Book-Cadillac, which is probably now the Sheraton something or other.

  Frankie had long since stopped being surprised by my erratic behavior. He opened his sleepy eyes and moved over in bed to make room for me and, to complete this story stranger than fiction, I proceeded to make love to that sweetly permissive Sicilian.

  The ankles remained so swollen that I had to wear bedroom slippers to rehearsals in Cleveland and even in Chicago for the long stay there.

  It was there in Chicago that Bette Davis said she’d not take further direction from Frank Corsaro and ordered him barred from the theatre. He stayed out of the theatre but remained in Chicago; but Bette said she could sense his lingering presence in Chicago and that he must be returned at once to New York and that goddam Actors’ Studio, which had spawned him.

  Then it was that Chuck Bowden and I took over direction, though Corsaro’s name remained on the bill. And there in Chicago, the unpredictable Bette, having won her battle against the “method,” gave a great Christmas party for us, presenting us each with a gift. She had with her a lovely tall blond girl, her daughter by one of her husbands, and it was as fine a Christmas as I’d known since childhood.

  A gentleman of the theatre is the rarest of aves. Shall I now give you my list of them? I mean those I’ve known in my time?

  José Quintero, Elia Kazan, Robert Whitehead, Joe Losey. And, yes, David Merrick, who always allowed me to bring in a play doomed for destruction on Broadway, and who is now on probation to be assessed according to his treatment of my new play “Red Devil Battery Sign.” And, of course, dear lost Tallulah.

  I put her in the gentlemen column not to disparage the lady, but because she was a lady who had that intransigent and vocally powerful presence of a “gent.”

  Naturally this list could be extended …

  Here comes a flashback.

  It was as early as 1960, I believe, that Frankie began to lose his vitality and turn moody. Of course I attributed this to drugs, not conceiving the possibility that he might be ill.

  But Frankie knew that he wasn’t well, and he went up to New York from Key West for a medical checkup. At about this time—due to his disinclination toward sex with me—I had taken up with a young queen of New Orleans who was known as the “Dixie Doxy” and had really earned his nickname. He was a handsome blond kid of about twenty-two with creamy skin and a very seductive backside which he was eager to offer.

  When Frankie returned from his medical checkup, the Dixie Doxy and I were in a posh hotel on Key Biscayne, living the life of Riley. The first full draft of Iguana was being put on at the Coconut Grove, nearby. Frankie somehow got word that we were there and he arrived unexpectedly on the spot, while the Dixie Doxy was promenading about the pool in crimson nylon swim-trunks, three-sheeting the scene.

  Frankie gazed at him with contempt. The Dixie Doxy felt himself quite secure in my favor and was not at all disconcerted by Frankie’s disdain.

  But needless to say, Frankie got me back to home territory, Key West, the next day and I did not see the blond again. But my sexually incontinent behavior continued.

  When the two-week run of the early version of Iguana had been completed, I invited the young director, Frank Corsaro, who had done a still earlier version of it in Spoleto the summer before, to come down to Key West, along with a very pleasant and personable kid who played one of Maxine’s male concubines in the play. The kid pretended to be able to drive a car but it became almost immediately apparent that he couldn’t. He couldn’t drive at all, the car kept sashaying from one side of the highway to the other, and I had to take over the wheel, although I had no driver’s license.

  Frankie was much taken with the kid himself, and our first night in Key West, Frankie wouldn’t come upstairs to bed. He sat smoking on the downstairs sofa and I may have been quite wrong in my suspicion that he was waiting for a chance to lure the kid out of the master bedroom downstairs—projecting my own desire.

  I flew into a jealous rage, and after going to bed and fuming upstairs for a while, I rushed downstairs and Frankie was still sitting like a male Lorelei on that sofa.

  “Come to bed,” I shouted. “I know what you’re up to! You don’t have to fear that I’ll subject you to any advances tonight, cause I wouldn’t touch you, now, with a ten-foot pole.”

  Frankie shrugged and came upstairs with me and was soon snoring while I lay awake until dawn.

  Things between The Horse and me continued to deteriorate, with short periods of reconciliation. Actually he never denied himself to me but he created an atmosphere with which I, with my fierce pride, could not very often compromise.

  One afternoon three queens from Miami came in town and checked into a motel on South Beach.

  I knew them only slightly, but, being in wanton spirit, I spent the afternoon and the early evening with them and it appears to me, now, that I had intimacies with all three—in a state of drunken abandon, all of it hardly more important than leaping a pig-sty.

  Frankie had prepared dinner or was still preparing
it when I came home to Duncan Street. His silence was ominous. I set myself down at our patio table like a king, waiting to be served. The kitchen door banged open and past me sailed a meat loaf, missing my head by inches. Then came a bowl of succotash, once again missing its target, then the salad and even the Silex of coffee.

  I was so drunk that these missiles did not alarm me. And when the kitchen door banged shut and Frankie had charged off in the car, I picked the meat loaf up off the tiles of the patio and ate it with as much gusto as if it had been served me on a golden platter.

  Frankie during this period had begun, mysteriously, to lose energy and weight. Now once again he went to New York for a medical checkup, and during his absence a very talented young painter whom I had met a year or so before in Tangier happened to call me from Miami to say he was there and I said, “I’m alone, come on down to Key West.”

  He came down that night and we spent several innocently idyllic spring days together. I was also into painting myself at that time, not at all well, only as a diversion from writing. The very gifted young painter from Tangier worked at one side of the patio and I at the other. He painted me—the excellent semiabstract portrait still hangs in the living room of my Key West house—and I painted an imaginary boy holding a guitar and wearing pink tights.

  One evening while this was going on, Frankie’s best friend dropped over for dinner. And after dinner the handsome young painter and I went inside while the others remained on the patio. I had not been to bed with the painter but that evening we turned off the lights in the living room and stretched out beside each other on the long sofa and hugged and exchanged long kisses.