by John Lahr
Bankhead had Williams’s number. She could tease him—“Tenn, you and I are the only consistently high Episcopalians I know”—and she could cut to the core of his insecurity. He was big in the world but not in himself. “Let’s face it,” Merlo, who had a ringside seat at their fight, said. “Tenn is vain and she wounds his vanity continually.” The new play, the new movies, the new money, the new (and short-lived) Williams-Wood production company, intended to maximize his cash and his clout, were a testament to the momentum of Williams’s career. (Even his Key West house was now “a regular stop for the sight-seeing buses.”) The velocity of his life, however, had reached the point of disintegration. The latter part of 1956—“the worst I can remember,” he told Britneva, who was now officially “Lady St. Just”—was spent “trying not to crack up.” “I am far from sure that I have succeeded,” he wrote. “I still keep up, as well as I can, a pretense of being a rational person. I have been absolutely alone during this ordeal. I have not been able to write a decent line since last spring and I believe my writing career is finished.”
Throughout 1956, as if perched on some spiritual fault line, pulled apart by the opposing frictions of his accelerating career and his “lost decency,” Williams felt himself approaching breaking point. “Living on Miltowns, seconals, and double shots of vodka with a splash of orange juice,” he wrote to Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy in May 1956, after the Florida tryout of an early version of the new play “The Enemy: Time,” now retitled Sweet Bird of Youth. “Frankie couldn’t take it and has gone to New York: a purely geographic separation.” On his own in St. Thomas, in the Virgin Islands, at the end of that enervating summer—“an almost unbroken decline in health and spirits”—Williams sat looking up at the stars. “I didn’t feel the presence of God. I haven’t felt it for a long time now,” he wrote in his diary. “Something’s awfully gone away from here, meaning me.”
Merlo was another thing slipping out of Williams’s reach. Although their relationship had begun to fray in private as early as 1951, Merlo’s charm had still burned brightly in public. The gregarious Merlo was always a lubricant to conversation; he ran social interference for Williams in the world. To Françoise Sagan, the newly anointed nineteen-year-old wunderkind of French literature, who encountered them first with Carson McCullers in Key West in 1954, Merlo seemed “perhaps the most charming man in America and Europe put together”—“light-hearted, droll, good, full of imagination.” A couple of years later, in Rome, Sagan joined Williams and Merlo at dinner with Anna Magnani, who spent the evening raging against men. After dinner, as they prowled Rome in Williams’s car, which Merlo was driving, a streetwalker recognized him at the wheel. “She did not even laugh when a whore, a friend of Frank’s called out to us gaily, or rather to him, pleadingly: E quando Franco? Quando, quando, quando?” Sagan added, “Tennessee, who was sitting in the back of the car, also smiled into his moustache, as if he were observing his rogue of a son chatting up a young girl. There was a great deal of tenderness between them, a very great deal.”
But by the summer of 1955 that tenderness was in short supply; the distance between the two men was noticeably wider. For long periods, Williams found himself traveling solo. “The Horse gave me a very bad time in Rome; perhaps I gave him an even worse time,” he wrote to Britneva. “He was always with that cynical street-boy Alvaro. . . . The Horse’s character, each summer with Alvaro, is hardened and cheapened so that I can’t stay with him but must keep flying around on these sad little trips.” For a while, Merlo was laid up in Rome with a series of illnesses. “I don’t think my company made him feel any better so it’s just as well I went away,” Williams wrote to Wood, adding a new regret to his litany of lamentations. “We never joke and laugh together, which is bad, as jokes and laughter do so much to relieve the human dilemma, but he touches me deeply, and while I doubt that I have ever deeply loved him, according to my extremely romantic conception of what love should be—as distinguished from the pleasures of the bed—still, he’s given me an awful lot in a period when it was needed.”
Williams longed for intimacy but shrank from its responsibilities. “He would be a trial to anyone who tried to take care of him. Frank Merlo, his man Friday, . . . has my sympathy,” his mother wrote. “To know me is not to love me,” Williams said. “At best, it is to tolerate me.” Among the many things that Merlo had to put up with—the increase of Williams’s workload, his drinking, his depressions, his temperament—the greatest was the increase in his renown. Merlo’s coolness to Williams was his way of contending with his own envy. “He is haunted continually by the feeling of insufficiency, that he is dependent on me, and yet doesn’t seem to be able to bring himself to the point of taking any positive action to change this state,” Williams confessed to Wood in 1955. Nonetheless, when the news of the half-million-dollar movie deal for Cat came through in the summer of 1955, Williams’s first thought was of the security it would afford them as a couple. “We don’t have to worry about ‘the hard stuff’ for another ten years, I guess,” he wrote to Merlo from Barcelona. “We’ll be old girls, by then, and can get our social security when it runs out, and by such little economies as saving old tea-bags and turning collars and cuffs, we can eke out a comfortable elderly existence in some quaint little cold-water walk-up in the West Nineties, with an occasional splurge at the YMHA when a surviving Sitwell gives a reading there. I’m afraid my eyesight will be getting rather dim, by that time, but my hearing may hold up.”
But money—both Williams’s earnings and the percentage that Merlo received from his plays—only dramatized the distance between them. Despite Williams’s protestations to the contrary, Merlo was increasingly an extra in Williams’s epic. As much as Williams wanted and demanded love, his first allegiance was to his writing; he could surrender himself completely to the page but never completely to a person. In the fall of 1955 and throughout the following year, he was engrossed in “The Enemy: Time,” as it mutated into Sweet Bird of Youth. “This is the first time in years that I have been able to work with unflagging interest on a play script for six and eight hours a day,” he said, adding, “It has the dynamics of what I think may very well turn out to be the strongest play I have written.” The work got Williams’s best self; his relationship got the rest. “ ‘Attention must be paid to this man’ before it’s too late,” Williams, contemplating sending Merlo to an analyst, wrote to Wood in 1955. The problem was that Williams couldn’t pay attention.
A workshop production of the play was scheduled at the Studio M Playhouse in Coral Gables in April 1956. Merlo was present one night in Key West when Williams read a new scene to George Keathley, who was directing, lighting, and designing the work-in-progress. “They were having troubles,” Keathley said. “Once, Tennessee turned to Frank after reading a new scene aloud and asked, ‘Do you like it, Frankie?’—‘No, I don’t!’—‘Why not?’—‘I don’t know, I just don’t!’—“But why not? What’s wrong with it?’—‘Don’t ask me, I’m not your goddamned yes-man!’ And with that Frank ran into another room, packed his bags and took off for a few days.” Keathley added, “After this they separated more and more.” Williams ended up moving to Miami to work in seclusion with Keathley while Merlo “held the fort during his absence, entertaining a wide circle of friends.”
Four days after the workshop production of Sweet Bird of Youth opened, Williams, distressed about Merlo, wrote to Britneva. “For the first time since I’ve known him, he’s started drinking a lot, and is full of complaints about his health and generally depressed and distrait,” he said. That summer, in Rome with Merlo, Williams tried to put into a poem, “How Can I Tell You?” the sense of wariness that had come between them:
With George Keathley at the studio production of Sweet Bird of Youth
How can I tell you? With my lips and my hands?
You might mistake their language.
It isn’t easily said.
There’s only moments when we can both believe it. . . .
The trouble is that doubt is always half true,
there is a hard kind of half accuracy in distrust which is hard, very hard,
to let go of.
Still: we stay with each other, we keep returning to places,
the search continues.
What are we looking for in the heart of each other?
Will it ever be clearly
the other and not the self that we so want to comfort?
By the summer of 1957, the crack in their relationship had become a chasm. “He has changed a great deal in the last month or two,” Williams confided to St. Just. “DRINKING HEAVILY! A couple of double vodkas before dinner. At night, coming in LOADED!—but sometime you can’t smell liquor on his breath. There is practically no real communication between us.” Neither Merlo nor Williams could quite face up to his aggression toward the other. Both men felt aggrieved, sad, confused, unheard, unable to separate but unsure of how to continue. Williams’s diary notes the constant flare-ups—“another big row with F.” (August 1956); “bad, nearly disastrous, quarrel” (February 1957).
Williams’s struggle to keep his relationship intact was played out, unconsciously, in his drama. His work of the mid-fifties acquired, according to Brooks Atkinson, a new “streak of savagery.” In the plays of those years, the idea of the couple was continuously subverted, dramatized as a travesty (Baby Doll), a tragedy (Orpheus Descending), or an impossibility (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof). No connection was allowed to exist without being spoiled, falsified, mocked, obliterated, robbed of its goodness, or lost forever. Part of this violence was an expression of Williams’s elemental rage, which the process of playwriting tapped into and released. “If something is wrong at the top, why not look at the bottom,” he wrote in an early version of Stairs to the Roof. “Volcanic eruptions are not the result of disturbances in the upper part of the crater: something way, way down—basic and fundamental is at the seat of the trouble.” Williams’s ambivalence about love—his longing for it and his need to diminish it—had its origins in the primary couple in his life: his toxic, unreachable parents. He had grown up with the sense “that to desire a thing or to love a thing intensely is to place yourself in a vulnerable position. To be a possible, if not probable, loser of what you most want.” While he was enduring the torture of increased separation from Merlo, and feeling both unloved and unlovable, his plays registered an ancient despair about the possibility of love.
In 1939, Williams had described his play Battle of Angels as a tale about “a boy who hungered for something beyond reality and got death by torture at the hands of a mob.” But in the intervening decade and a half, the valence of his life had dramatically shifted. Inevitably, so had his surrogate in the play. In Battle of Angels, Val was a hunted, primitive saint; in Orpheus Descending, he was a vagrant, jaded sensualist, “fighting his own descent into a hell of his own making,” Williams explained to the Miami Herald in 1956. During the gestation of Battle of Angels, Williams himself had been a pilgrim soul, a newcomer to the “trapeze of the flesh,” living from hand to mouth, with a literary reputation to gain and nothing to lose. By the time the play reached its final form in 1957, Williams was struggling with a sense that his heart had atrophied: “we persist, like the cactus,” he wrote in his notebook. He had not so much transcended his wounded self as been trapped by his attempts to escape it. His life depended on his writing; his writing fed off his life, and his life had become attenuated by his wayward habit of being. “Unfortunately in 1940 I was a younger and stronger and—curiously!—more confident writer than I am in the Fall of 1953,” he wrote to Wood after sending her the first draft of Orpheus Descending, which failed to impress. “Now I am a maturer and more knowledgeable craftsman of the theatre, my experience inside and outside the profession is vastly wider, but still the exchange appears to be to my loss.”
In January 1957—two months before the Broadway opening of Orpheus Descending—Williams found himself in a hell from which even the big magic of writing could not seem to save him. “For the first time I think I may stay away from rehearsals,” he wrote to Maria St. Just. “I am too destroyed at this time to be of any assistance.” He continued, “Of course I have been through periods somewhat like this before, when the sky cracked and fell and brained me, but this time I seem less able to struggle out of the debris. I’m at a loss to explain it. I suppose it’s partly Mother’s nervous breakdown”—Edwina, suffering from paranoid delusions of being poisoned by her maid and murdered by her chauffeur, was briefly hospitalized in September 1956—“and the shock of Rose’s sudden deterioration when I put her in the ‘Institute for Living,’ which I had hoped would do her so much good. But the unaccountable collapse of my power to work, since work has always been my escape and comfort, is more likely to be the root of trouble.”
Williams longed, as he wrote to Kazan in March, to “recapture some of my earlier warmth and openness in relation to people, which began to go when I began to be famous.” The guitar-toting Val of Orpheus Descending incarnated Williams’s moral exhaustion. “He is still trapped in his corruption and engaged in his struggle to maintain his integrity and purity . . . a duality not reconciled,” Williams said, speaking as much for himself as for Val. He spelled out his self-loathing most succinctly not in the play but in the opening minutes of his screenplay adaptation, The Fugitive Kind (1959). “I felt like my whole life was somethin’ sick in my stomach and I just had to throw it up. So I threw it up,” Val tells a judge who releases him from jail in the movie.
When the curtain rises on Battle of Angels, the dry-goods store is a reflective, even picturesque museum of the tragedy that the play recounts in flashback; in Orpheus Descending, we encounter an altogether more dynamic, foreboding, and oppressive landscape. Williams’s stage directions suggest a crepuscular, deadly world: walls “streaked with moisture and cobwebbed,” the “black skeleton” of a dressmaker’s dummy, a “sinister-looking artificial palm,” a “disturbing emptiness” outside the windows. Even the confectionery that is part of the store is “shadowy and poetic as some inner dimension of the play.” The heart’s calcification is central to the reconceptualization of Orpheus; it is the presenting symptom of both of the main characters when they first meet. When Val wanders into town, the sharp-tongued and volatile Lady Torrance, who runs the dry-goods store, pulls a gun on Val; “she’s not a Dago for nothin’!” one character says. Lady has been “coarsened, even brutalized, by her ‘marriage with death,’ ” Williams explained. Val also has been “brutalized by the places and circumstances of his wanderings.”
Where the Val of Battle of Angels was full of rebellious romantic gas, the Val of Orpheus Descending, who wears a stolen Rolex from his hustling days, is full of moral atrophy. “Corruption—rots men’s hearts and—rot is slow,” he tells Vee, a mystic and painter who is married to the local sheriff and has seen lynchings, beatings, and convicts torn to pieces by dogs. Val understands Vee’s paintings as an attempt to redeem the ugliness they’ve both witnessed, “from seats down front at the show,” he says. He has paid a physical price for his life of indulgence. “Heavy drinking and smoking the weed and shacking with strangers is okay for kids in their twenties but this is my thirtieth birthday and I’m all through with that route,” he says to the wild child Carol Cutrere, who recognizes him from her debauched past. Echoing his creator’s frequent complaint, Val adds, “I’m not young any more. . . . You’re not young at thirty if you’ve been on a Goddam party since you were fifteen.”
In Williams’s rewriting of the Orpheus myth, there are two hells into which Val descends: one is the degradation of his own desires, and the other is Lady’s hell, a sort of trifecta of tragedy imposed on her by the brutish rural world in which she is trapped. Orphaned as a teenager, when her Italian immigrant father, “a Wop bootlegger,” died fighting a blaze in his wine garden—which was set by racists because he sold wine to blacks—she was forced to have an abortion after her aristocratic lover, David Cutrere, jilted her for
a society marriage. Of her sadistic and domineering husband, Jabe, one of the gossiping town biddies says, “He bought her, when she was a girl of eighteen! He bought her and bought her cheap because she’d been thrown over and her heart was broken by that.” Lady’s subservience is signaled by her bedridden husband’s constant pounding with his cane on the floor above, which makes him a ghostly, terrifying, annihilating presence. (“He is death’s self,” one stage direction reads.) In his only appearance in act 1, Jabe, returning to his bed after a trip to the hospital, stops to notice a change Lady has made in the store. “How come the shoe department’s back here now?” he asks. “Tomorrow I’ll get me some niggers to help me move the shoe department back front.” Jabe’s voice is the voice of Williams’s father, CC, the contemptuous, bullying Voice of No, canceling out Lady’s imagination and innovation. “You do whatever you want to, it’s your store,” Lady says.
Dressed in black and always at Jabe’s call, Lady is an embodiment of the living death of resignation. “I wanted death after that, but death don’t come when you want it, it comes when you don’t want it!” she confesses to David Cutrere, when they finally see each other again at the store. “I wanted death, then, but I took the next best thing. You sold yourself. I sold my self. You was bought. I was bought. You made whores of us both!” Loveless and full of loathing for her compromised life, Lady feels as corrupted in her own way as Val does. When she flirts with him as he applies for a job—“What else can you do? Tell me some more about your self-control!”—he swaggers, “Well, they say that a woman can burn a man down. But I can burn down a woman . . . any two-footed woman.” Lady is disarmed; she throws her head back “in sudden friendly laughter as he grins at her.” Burning is, of course, a symbol of both desire and purification, which is part of Val’s powerful unconscious appeal to her.