by John Lahr
In May, trying to negotiate some “freedom from pressure,” Williams instructed Wood to “tell everybody who wants a quart of my blood that I am suffering from pernicious anemia.” In July, as part of his campaign of rest and recuperation, he took a two-hour drive from New York to Pennsylvania to see Diana Barrymore, the daughter of the legendary actor John Barrymore, play Blanche in Streetcar. “She has the Barrymore madness and power and her last three scenes were remarkable,” he told St. Just, about the wafer-thin actress who shared his enthusiasm for “happy pills and sleepy pills” and whom he took to dinner afterward. “When we went backstage, the poor thing looked as if she had been drenched by a fire-hose.” Williams went on, “What happens to actresses in my plays?! . . . I seem to push them over, I mean around that well-known corner, maybe because I’m around it too, and not pushing but calling?”
Williams was a performance without an intermission. By the fall, alternately polishing Period of Adjustment and working “like crazy on ‘Night of the Iguana’ and I do mean crazy,” he found himself right up against his old malignant demons. To his friend Lilla Van Saher, Williams reported that several times on his travels he’d thrown awful, hysterical public scenes. “Something suddenly triggers my nerves and I flip! Really flip,” he said, writing after a sleepless night, in such a state that he had “knelt beside the bathtub and prayed to God.” “There is some volcano of violence in me and though I work every morning, as ever, it doesn’t seem to release enough of the tension to get me peacefully and rationally through what is left of the day.” As usual, Williams vowed to seek clinical help; as usual, the only interpretations to which he submitted were his own.
In December, Williams sent Period of Adjustment to Kazan. “Oh, God, Gadg, I don’t know,” Williams said, calling the play an “affirmation of sweetness in four troubled young people.” “If it interests you, baby, please try not to think in terms of radical revision because I’m not up to it. . . . If you have some inspirations, aside from that, give them to me, but don’t count on me being more than just willing to, for the Piper has arrived to collect his pay at my door and someone has let him in and told him that I am at home!”
To this rueful intimation, Williams added one last winded note. “I don’t feel ready for the Sixties,” he said.
CHAPTER 7
Kookhood
Perhaps my heart has died in me. If it is dead, I didn’t mean to kill it.
—TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
to Hermione Baddeley, 1963
The sixties came in like a lion and stayed that way. On January 25, 1960, Diana Barrymore, one of the army of gallant lost souls whom Williams held dear, died at the age of thirty-eight from a heart attack apparently induced by an overdose of alcohol and drugs. The blanket of two thousand violets that draped her coffin at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel in New York was from Williams, who had flown from Key West to attend the funeral. “She had great honesty and a great capacity for love—and she died for lack of it,” he told the press. Barrymore, who was given her first drink by her father at age thirteen, and was dubbed “Personality Deb No. 1” by the press at seventeen, had botched the early promise of her film career and lost many years to alcohol and drug addictions and three turbulent marriages. She chronicled her louche lonely life in her best-selling autobiography, Too Much, Too Soon (1957). In the book’s final paragraph, she invoked Brooks Atkinson’s review of her theatrical comeback, at the age of thirty-five, in 1956. (“Any time she wants to stop fooling around and learn the difference between acting and performing,” Atkinson had written, “she can be an exciting actress. The stuff is there.”) “I repeat my vow—and mean it,” she wrote in the book’s last lines. “I promise. You’ll see. You will indeed, Mr. Atkinson! Perhaps I have begun to find my way.”
Diana Barrymore
For Barrymore, Williams was the pathfinder and the path. He was a kind of household god, an Orpheus who had led her back from her subterranean hell and into the light. “I don’t mean this in a sacrilegious way, but he is my savior on earth,” she wrote to Dakin Williams in April 1959. Barrymore was a wild but warm woman who often partied with Tennessee. Sometimes she dressed in male drag and pimped for him; sometimes, drunk and stoned, they would put Puccini’s Madame Butterfly on the record player and act it out, with Williams playing Cio-Cio San to Barrymore’s Pinkerton. She was also a frequent interpreter of his works. In 1958, she had taken on the role of Maggie in a touring production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Good reviews had led to a successful engagement, the following year in Chicago, as Catharine Holly in Suddenly Last Summer, and finally as Blanche, in the summer-stock production of Streetcar.
“You can make a career of playing Tennessee Williams, and I almost have,” Barrymore told the Miami Herald. “What shall I do when I finish him? I hope I never shall. Everything else seems weak and ineffectual.” (At the time of her death, Williams was writing The Poem of Two, a play in which he planned to cast her opposite Maureen Stapleton.) Barrymore hoped that her performance as Blanche would be a springboard back to major critical acclaim as the actress playing Princess Kosmonopolis in the London production of Sweet Bird of Youth—a role that she was convinced would be her artistic redemption. “1960 is our year—I know it,” she told the poet and actor Gilbert Maxwell. Barrymore’s grand plan was confirmed by an astrologer she had consulted. “Not knowing anything of ‘Bird,’ she said, I would be going to England possibly in November—to do a play by the man who had changed my life (all this before she knew it was Tennessee),” Barrymore confided to Dakin. “The more I think about Tom (and that’s most of my waking and sleeping time) I think it’s going to come sooner.”
Williams had given Barrymore a gold charm bracelet from which dangled an amulet the size of a quarter emblazoned with his familiar insignia: “10.” “She flashed it everywhere and with it an implied story that Tennessee’s promise to play the Princess had come with the bracelet. Although she said it many times, I doubt if it was true,” George Keathley, who directed her in Streetcar, said. Williams encouraged Barrymore to try out for the role, and she did so twice, in front of Wood, Crawford, and Williams. Because the Princess reclines on a bed in the first scene of act 1, Barrymore performed for them while lying on her back. But for Williams, her performance “held no surprise.” “I thought Diana was too much like the princess to play the princess well,” he said. “She was a girl with talent but not enough talent and it haunted her and was destroying her.” To Lucy Freeman, he wrote, “She read the part with a violence that defeated the part, which has to be held in the restraint, the controlled sense of measure, that Geraldine Page, under Kazan’s direction, was able to give it.”
Kazan refused to audition Barrymore for the New York production, which she considered “the most heart-breaking point in my whole life.” “My hatred for Kazan burns black,” she confided to Dakin. “If he had not wanted to play Svengali with Miss Page I would have done it—the woman is me—as I was—Finished at 36—I was! If I had been given a reading it would have been mine—Kazan could have started my life in November—now it will be a few months—it is hard to forgive a man who delays your true re-birth. But as in the Book of Job Love conquers all. My idolatry of Tom chases my black thoughts away. . . . So many nights I go to the theatre here [in Chicago] and I think of her in New York. She’s in the dressing room making up for my part. I also comfort myself that Thank God I’m playing Williams—that is the one thing that makes this waiting bearable. I will pray for London.”
Princess Kosmonopolis was not the only role that Barrymore wanted to play; she was also auditioning to be Mrs. Tennessee Williams. “The only strong men I had met were violent men,” Barrymore wrote, at the end of Too Much, Too Soon. “What I needed, I thought, was a strong man who was gentle, who would be lover and father.” Williams became her idée fixe; she campaigned for the author as well as the part. Barrymore charmed her way into the Williams family, by flying to St. Louis to take tea with Miss Edwina and cultivating a close friendship wi
th Dakin (they referred to each other as “Sister” and “Brother”). “Just your brother matters to me—nothing else,” she wrote to Dakin, as she was astonished to feel “for the first time in my life—my only concern was for someone else.” She added, “This genius touched by God Himself is so helpless about everyday things. And like all true pure Geniuses he doesn’t know how divine he is and how blessed.”
After the run of Suddenly Last Summer she joined Williams and two other friends for a four-day holiday in Havana. “It was an idyll,” she reported to Dakin. “In my whole life I’ve never been so happy—I’m not even used to spelling the word, I’m so unused to it!” She and Williams dined together at a restaurant where a band played and she sang; they took in the lavish floor show at the Tropicana Club; they joined Wood and Liebling, on their way back from a Caribbean holiday, for another congenial outing. “If you don’t watch out, boy, I’m going to be flower girl at your wedding,” Wood joked to Williams. In Barrymore’s deluded imagination, the warmth of Williams’s “sympathetic attachment” to her, as he called it, was blown up into the heat of romance. “Tom and I have talked of many things,” she told Dakin. “He knows I love him now—it’s going to take him time to realize how selflessly. Frankly, it appalled me to know at long last what it is just to love someone with your whole heart and soul.”
Years later, Williams recalled Barrymore’s glamour but not her avowals of love: “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,” he said, of the Havana holiday. “She was so striking in it with her dark hair and flashing eyes. She was very lovely.” To Lucy Freeman, he argued, “Diana loved me as a writer only. That’s the truth and all of it. It couldn’t have been otherwise. . . . I am peculiarly lacking in the qualities of a male-charmer and heart-breaker. I would say I am sort of the opposite, especially during these last five or six years when almost nothing but work meant anything to me. And I wasn’t sure of the work.” He added, “Diana’s only great passion, perhaps her only true love, was her struggle to become a good artist.”
Williams was “deeply disturbed” by Barrymore’s death and concerned about his contribution to the professional and personal disappointments that pushed her over the edge. (The scenario echoed his guilt over the fate of his bright, fragile sister.) “I didn’t think she would take it so badly. And, actually, ‘Sweet Bird’ has never been done in England. . . . 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,” Williams wrote in Memoirs, a disingenuous account, as mistaken in its timeline as in its facts. Williams did know—had to know—about Barrymore’s desire to play the Princess. She had proclaimed her entitlement to the heavens. She had spoken and written about it to Dakin; she had auditioned for Williams himself. At a Christmas party, a month before she died, she had even argued about the role with Williams, in front of Gilbert Maxwell. “The two of them were really at each other—Diana, on the floor by the sofa where he sat,” Maxwell recalled. “I was made to play this part and I’m going to have it,” she hectored Williams, shaking her finger at him, quoting the play. “When monster meets monster, remember.” Maxwell observed, “It was half in jest, all of it, but there was a desperate seriousness in her intent. And at last, Tenn cried out, ‘All right. I’ve told you I don’t think it’s for you, but if you want it this bad, I will do all I can.’ ” He didn’t.
BARRYMORE’S COLLAPSE WASN’T the only one on Williams’s mind. Period of Adjustment, the play that Williams was readying with Elia Kazan for a Broadway opening in November 1960, was a comedy in which a house—always a metaphor of the self in the Williams canon—is disappearing before its owner’s eyes, “sinking into [a cavern] gradually, an inch or two inches a year.” The cracks and lurchings of the play’s Spanish-style suburban Memphis bungalow echo the internal disturbances of its lovelorn personalities: Ralph Bates, the homeowner, who has been abandoned on Christmas Eve by his wife and child, and George Haverstick, who is ready to call it quits after twenty-four hours of unconsummated marriage to a virginal bride. For both men, love has temporarily been lost, only later to be refound. “The human heart would never pass the drunk test,” Ralph says. “If you took the human heart out of the human body and put a pair of legs on it and told it to walk a straight line, it couldn’t do it.”
Period of Adjustment—a play that, Williams said, “isn’t my best by a long shot, but is nevertheless as honest a play as I’ve written”—meditates on changes of heart and the possibility of reconciliation. Written in a lighter, more benign tone than his usual, tormented one, and aspiring “to cast a kinder shadow, with more concentration on the quieter elements of existence,” the play was Williams’s demonstration that he was more than “the nightmare merchant of Broadway,” as Time called him, and his answer to Dr. Kubie’s accusation that he wrote “only violent melodramas” to appease his ambivalent, angry heart. “After my analysis I have reached a big decision about myself,” Williams told the press that August. “I think perhaps I had too much hate in me. Hate can be constructive, but perhaps I hated more than I should. I am going to make a change.” He had called it quits, he said, with “what have been called my ‘black’ plays. Maybe analysis has helped to get them out of my system. If it works, I owe it all to Dr. Kubie, a great and sympathetic analyst.”
Subtitled High Point over a Cavern: A Serious Comedy, A Period of Adjustment expressed, Williams said, “more belief in the truth of people having tender need of each other, transcending their personal vanities and hurt feelings, than any of my other plays with the possible exception of ‘The Rose Tattoo.’ ” The issues of frigidity, ambivalence, and bad faith that beset his mismatched couples are never seriously engaged, however, and a benevolent glow hangs over their fraught connections. “We all have to be smart and lucky,” the virgin Isabel says to her new and temporarily impotent husband, “Or unlucky and silly.”
Still, in the portrait of Ralph, one can see a stand-in for Williams in his relationship with Merlo: like Ralph, Williams wanted to renew the tenderness between him and his lover; like Ralph, he couldn’t clearly see his own failures of compassion. For all of Ralph’s vaunted capacity to feel—he is “one of those rare people that have the capacity of heart to truly care,” a stage direction reads—he is habitually unfair toward his wife, Dorothea, whom he married for money and whom he describes as “a girl with no looks, a plain, homely girl that probably no one but me had ever felt anything but just—SORRY FOR.” Williams shared with Ralph that capacity for unfairness and he knew it; he called himself “unintentionally unfair but sure as hell unfair. At least my analyst said so.” So did Wood, who pointed out how he tended to “very often . . . misjudge Frank.” Williams liked to portray himself as the victim of Merlo’s emotional caprice, when his own temperament was equally infuriating, oblivious to its aggression. “It becomes difficult to distinguish between artistic temperament, simple temperament, and simply temper,” Williams said. “In order to get along with me you have to be like my Frankie, and take a lot.”
After having ministered to Williams during the ordeal of Sweet Bird—“he was an angel all during rehearsals and tryout,” Williams said, declaring himself “more deeply in love with Frankie than ever before”—Merlo needed his own period of readjustment. “Frank made it clear that he didn’t want me with him in Key West, that he wanted to be the ‘Big Daddy’ on that little plantation. Uncontested,” Williams told Kazan in June 1959. “He feels he’s done his bit for me and he’s pushed me out of the nest, so I’ve got to fly alone again.” But by the end of the year, Williams was contemplating pulling up his East Coast stakes and moving West with Merlo. “I think Frank would be reluctantly willing, and when he got out there he would be happy about it,” he wrote to Christopher Isherwood. “Things are much better betwee
n us. There must be something. I don’t know the mysteries of it, but there surely is something still very strong between us.”
Williams and Merlo settled into a kind of negotiated truce, “in voices turned softer by love’s exhaustion and hate’s,” as Williams wrote in “A Separate Poem” (1962), which memorialized the détente of their last months together. The poem, originally entitled “Lost Continent,” was an anatomy of resignation and of love contaminated by disappointment:
When we speak to each other
we speak of things that mean nothing of what we meant to each other.
Small things
gather about us as if to shield our vision from a wide landscape
untouched by the sun and yet blindingly lighted.
We say small things to each other
in quiet, tired voices, hoarsened as if by shouting across a great distance.
We say small things to each other carefully, politely,
such as:
Here’s the newspaper, which part of it do you want?
Oh, I don’t care, any part but the funnies or ads . . .
But under the silence of what we say to each other,
is the much more articulate silence of what we don’t say to each other,
a storm of things unspoken,
coiled, reserved, appointed,
ticking away like a clock attached to a time-bomb:
crash, fire, demolition
wound up in the quietly,
almost tenderly,
small, familiar things spoken.
The cocoon of medicated calm lasted into the summer of 1960. “The Horse is on pills and aged Cuban rum which he drinks out of ice-tea glasses filled to the brim, and is writing poetry, some of it remarkably good,” Williams wrote to St. Just in August. “We don’t quarrel anymore, it’s all very sad, nice, and peaceful, with the Horse pushing forty and me pushing fifty. Where did the years go, so quickly? Even the dogs and the Parrott seem to wonder.” Over the previous two years, Merlo had begun to drink harder than before; he was in the habit—Williams found it endearing—“of passing out stoned on the floor and me pouring a pitcher of ice-water over him in a useless attempt to revive him.” A whiff of the autumnal had seeped into their life together and also into the poems that Merlo had begun to write, whose observations about the natural world contained a rueful intimation of endings: