by John Lahr
I saw a white dove in a tree.
The tree was white, the leaves were three.
These leaves, I noticed as I passed,
were shaped as bells of crimson glass
And azure glass and emerald glass:
I felt them tremble as I passed.
The dove stood in the tree alone
and in her beak she clutched a bone.
This was my love, I heard her cry,
I drank his blood and watched him die.
I drank his blood, the dove confessed,
because I loved him to excess.
Then as I passed my body thinned,
it lifted on a gust of wind,
And I was high above the hill,
the universe was white and still
And there was neither tree nor bird
and no bell struck and no leaf stirred.
In April, Williams reported brightly to St. Just from Key West that Merlo was in his nearby pad, while “waiting to take over the house when Charlie Nightingale [Nicklaus] and I go back abroad, later this month or early next. It isn’t a perfect arrangement but nothing in life is.” Williams added, “He is full of energy and spirit and when I saw him at dinner last night, a fabulous pasta which he cooked with his culinary genius, he coughed only once and was jumping and charging about with all his old vitality.” Nicklaus’s memory of the time was grimmer. “Tennessee got Frank a television set, and we went over to see him one night,” he recalled. “We pulled up to the house, and it was dark, but the television screen was flickering. We talked briefly, and then we left. Tennessee was very upset. ‘His legs are so thin,’ he said. ‘He used to have such strong legs. He just looks so gaunt. I just can’t stand the idea of him sitting there by himself like that.’ He asked me, ‘Do you think maybe it would work if Frank came back and we stayed together in Duncan Street?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ ”
When Merlo moved back, he stayed upstairs in the master bedroom while Williams and Nicklaus slept downstairs. The new living arrangement created some inevitable confusion: Williams found himself emotionally re-involved with Merlo; Nicklaus found himself marginalized. “I think Tennessee’s and my relationship would have lasted much longer without these awful pressures being brought upon it,” he said. “I became less and less real and Frank became more and more real. I could sense that I was receding in this entire picture. For all practical purposes, Frank and Tennessee were lovers again. I would wonder at times, Why am I here?” As Williams wrote in Memoirs, Frank “seemed annoyed that I remained so long in Key West that spring. . . . This was not because he resented Nicklaus—the poet was wonderful to him; but he treated Nicklaus almost as if he didn’t exist, which was close to the truth, by this time: I mean in my heart.” Williams went on, “Frankie didn’t want a witness to his decline, not such a close one as I. So in the middle of May, Nicklaus and I flew North.” In fact, Williams and Nicklaus flew to Europe.
Though Williams and Nicklaus’s first year together had gone “swimmingly,” according to Nicklaus, the second year brought “some pretty bad arguments.” The worst flare-up occurred in Key West just before they left. After a night of drinking and bickering, Nicklaus lay down on the living-room couch. “Tennessee was ready to go to bed. He didn’t stay up late in Key West. He liked to get up in the morning and work,” Nicklaus recalled. “Time went by, and Tennessee shouted through the bedroom door, ‘Well, are you coming in?’ I said, ‘I think I’ll sleep here on the couch.’ ” Nicklaus continued, “Tennessee came and poured some Scotch in my ear. I happen to be very sensitive about my ears. I was infuriated. It came to blows.” The row—“the worst crisis in our relationship,” according to Nicklaus—was forgiven but not forgotten.
After bouncing around Rome, Barcelona, and Tangiers, by mid-June, Williams and Nicklaus were in England, enjoying the hospitality of Lady St. Just, who threw a few star-studded parties in Williams’s honor. Despite the fun, Williams was still preoccupied with thoughts of Merlo. On a trip to Brighton—“the air is as stimulating as the new green pills,” he wrote to Vaccaro—Williams and St. Just called Merlo in Key West. “Although he made no reference to it, I sensed that he was not as well as before I left,” Williams wrote to Vaccaro. “Anyway I have him on my mind too continually to enjoy being on the other side of the sea.” Writing to Paul Bowles from London on June 13, he said of Nicklaus, “He has seen me through an intolerable period in my life but now I think my place is alone with Frank till things work out whichever way they are going to. He’s one of the few I’ve loved deeply.”
Williams decided to return to Key West. “All this, the cutting short of the holiday and the return alone to Frank, is a bit hard on Frederick,” he told Vaccaro, “but home is where you’ve hung the most years with someone, and Frederick will stay on the pay-roll and perhaps he’ll like being alone for a while, or with other companions.” Finding the climate too hot, however, Williams convinced Merlo to join Nicklaus and him in Nantucket—a trip that Merlo, it turned out, was too debilitated to enjoy. He didn’t like the rented cottage. He wouldn’t go out. He picked at his food. The ménage stuck it out together for only a week. “I’d rather bear the heat of New York or Key West,” Williams wrote to Wood. “Socially and emotionally, there’s only Frank right now, and I think we’ll stand by each other. There’s that much to cling to beside my work.” Williams dispatched Nicklaus to Florida and holed up in New York while Merlo underwent cobalt therapy at Memorial Hospital, treatments that burned his chest black. Merlo would never see Key West again.
“We do very little,” Williams wrote to St. Just on August 5. “Read and watch television.” Merlo slept in the bedroom; Williams took the long couch in the study. “Each night—this is what is particularly painful to remember—I would hear him turn the bolt on the bedroom door,” Williams recalled. By the time Merlo returned to the hospital later that month, he weighed less than a hundred pounds. The Horse, who had looked like “a little Hercules,” now called to mind a skeletal sparrow. He had to be wheeled to his bed, which was on a ward for brain-cancer patients. “It was a nightmare to look at them,” Williams recalled. “I begged him not to stay in that ward but to take a private room. He said sharply, ‘It doesn’t matter at all to me now, I think I like being with them.’ ”
The opening of the newest version of Milk Train, in Abingdon, Virginia, called Williams away from Merlo’s bedside for a week and a half. “I remember seeing Frank in the hospital during his final days,” Williams’s lawyer, Alan U. Schwartz, who also represented Truman Capote, Tom Stoppard, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, said. “Tennessee had not communicated with him and he was anxious to hear about Tennessee and to send messages to him through others. I think he felt isolated, deserted, and bruised and abused. Despite the fact that Frank was always sort of a rough-and-ready guy, at this stage he was anything but rough and ready.” In Memoirs, Williams defended his absence by claiming that Merlo “had been in and out of Memorial so often, I did not recognize this time as the final one.” Maureen Stapleton, who called Merlo “my dear buddy” and who was with him at the hospital almost every day, chivied Williams to get back to his bedside. So did Williams’s cousin, the Reverend Sidney Lanier. The day after Milk Train opened in Virginia—September 16—Williams got a call from Al Sloane, a Key West friend of Merlo’s who’d been in attendance during his hospitalization; Merlo had taken a turn for the worse. “I said, ‘He’ll die this Thursday. I’ll fly back at once,’ ” Williams wrote in Memoirs, adding in a chilling, defensive sentence. “And I flew back before the reviews of the Barter Theatre production came out.”
On the day of Merlo’s death—Friday, September 20, 1963—Williams was with him. Merlo was moved to a private room. In the shift from the ward, however, his oxygen cylinder was left behind; it took about half an hour to catch up with him. Merlo was restless and gasping “like a hooked fish,” Williams said. Every few minutes he’d get up from his bed to sit in a chair, then, unable to get comfortable, stagger back to bed a few minutes l
ater. (One punishing fact excluded from Williams’s account both in his memoir and in his 1981 play Something Cloudy, Something Clear was acknowledged in his unpublished poem “The Final Day of Your Life”: “You sat up in the chair next to mine. / We didn’t look at each other, and all I was able to say / is that you seemed to be stronger.”) The last exchanges of the “dreadful vigil” would replay in Williams’s mind for the rest of his life:
“Frankie, try to lie still.”
“I feel too restless today. The visitors tired me out.”
“Frankie, do you want me to leave you now?”
“No, I’m used to you.”
Merlo then turned onto his side, facing away from Williams, and “pretended to sleep,” Williams said. “The statement of habituation was hard to interpret as an admission of love, but love was never a thing that Frankie had been able to declare to me except over a long-distance phone,” he recalled. At the beginning of their relationship, Williams had written poignantly in a poem, “My name for him is Little Horse / I wish he had a name for me.” At the end of their fifteen years together, he still hadn’t won any terms of endearment from Merlo.
Williams sat silently beside Merlo for a while; then, around four o’clock that afternoon, he left. He went straight to the office of his psychiatrist, Dr. William G. Von Stein. After Williams “told him rather hysterically what a nightmare Frankie’s last days at Memorial had turned into,” Stein gave him a sedative shot. Then, Williams said, “my hysteria took a different turn.” “Tennessee just couldn’t stand it anymore,” his friend Richard Leavitt recalled. “He suggested we go out. He just wanted to be around people, in bars full of bodies, people living.” With Leavitt, Nicklaus, and Gilbert Maxwell—“friends that were mine not yours,” as he wrote in “The Final Day of Your Life”—Williams hit a series of gay bars, ending up “quite drunk.” Around 11:30 P.M., he was back in his apartment on Sixty-Fifth Street when a phone call came from Merlo’s friend, the Key West architect Dan Stirrup. At 11:05 Merlo had died while sitting up in bed to take his medicine. “I usually answered the phone and took messages,” Nicklaus recalled. “But Tennessee answered it. I thought to myself, ‘Oh my goodness, this is probably it.’ Tennessee hung up and said, ‘Well, Frank’s gone.’ ”
“I AM JUST beginning, now, to feel the desolation of losing my dear little Horse,” Williams wrote to St. Just, three days after Merlo’s death. “I saw him yesterday, lying in state at the family wake, and he looked like a saint, and like himself, too.” Merlo had two funerals. The first, arranged by his family, was a requiem mass held at St. Ignatius Loyola on Park Avenue and Eighty-Fourth Street in New York; the second was at Frank E. Campbell’s Funeral Chapel, a few blocks away, on Madison Avenue, where Williams had Merlo’s corpse transferred to a less garish casket. Williams organized the second service and the star-studded guest list, which included Marlon Brando, who arrived on his motorcycle. Although Williams wrote Merlo’s eulogy, he wasn’t able to read it at the service. Instead, in front of a packed room, the Reverend Sidney Lanier read “a recollection written by someone who knew and loved him”:
He was a man of honor.
He had a clearly defined code of behavior which nothing in life or death could make him alter. . . . The way would not change. It could not be changed. And when you had learned it, you knew that it was right.
In some persons such an inalterable character might be irritating. In the case of Frank it was, on the contrary, a source of unfailing reassurance as a beacon light in a harbor.
He had no onstage part in the theater: he didn’t act for it or write for it. But for more than fifteen years he was a vital part of it. He loved people in the theater and he knew their names, first and last names, and a star meant no more to him than a player who had just a walk-on. He knew the first and last names of the men on the light board, the stage manager, the propmen, the stage doorman.
He had a unique capacity for knowing and liking people, and all he demanded of them for his understanding and liking was a decent honesty in them, and he had a unique gift for drawing out of them the best that they had to give.
Frank Merlo at age forty, the year of his death, 1963
Being above all honest, he had a phenomenal instinct for that quality in others. And he had a personal warmth and sweetness that could evoke those sometimes timid qualities in all whom he knew and accepted. . . .
He was a giving person, always giving of himself and whatever he owned. The generosity of his heart, and its gift for understanding, made him superior to us in a way he probably never knew.
He had the kind of pride which is nobility and it was never broken once by the illness that has ended his living, visible presence. . . .
One time on a two-motor plane flying over high mountains, one of the plane’s engines suddenly failed. His companion, as the plane lost altitude steadily over the mountain range on its way back to its point of departure, found it necessary to wash down two pills with the contents of a pocket flask of whiskey in order to endure the apparently imminent prospect of crashing in flame. But Frank sat quietly reading his book, after saying casually, “Oh, I’ve flown back over the South Pacific, after a bombing mission, on a four-motor bomber with only one or two motors working a lot of times, and made it home safe. Drink? No, I don’t want a drink. There’s nothing to worry about.”
And it was the proudly unafraid face of his companion that kept Frank’s friend from giving in to his panic, not the medications and the liquor but that seemingly casual reassurance and that seemingly calm concentration on the book that he held before his beautifully, strongly cut face.
As an epigraph to the poem of Frank’s life and death, his plane companion, over mountains and oceans, can think of none more suitable than Stephen Spender’s line: “I think continually of those who were truly great.”
After the funeral, Williams did not follow the cortege to the cemetery; he couldn’t bear to see Merlo lowered into the ground. Instead, he returned to the apartment with Elia and Molly Kazan. A few days later, the Kazans, with the Steinbecks in tow, dropped by Williams’s apartment to console him. “He was pacing the floor, saying, ‘How am I ever gonna live without Frank?’ ” Elaine Steinbeck said. “When Frankie was dying, there was a new form of grief, and maybe a new form of guilt, for Tennessee to deal with, and I think it broke him,” Cheryl Crawford shrewdly observed.
When Alan U. Schwartz came to the New York apartment one day to discuss some professional matters, Williams discouraged even the mention of Merlo, which “made the talk somewhat dull on his part,” Schwartz said. The two men drank martinis and tried to make conversation. Off to the side of the large room in a golden cage, Creature, the monkey that Merlo had cared for in Key West (and cried over when he thought it had escaped—“I don’t know why this creature appealed so strongly to Frankie,” Williams wrote), was making chirping noises. After a while, Schwartz looked over at the cage and noticed that the monkey seemed to be in some difficulty; he was not chirping as much and his movements were disjointed. “Tenn, your monkey seems to be sick,” Schwartz said. “Tennessee raised his lidded eyes and glanced over at the cage and gave me one of his knowing smiles. ‘No, Alan, he is just fine,’ he said.” The conversation meandered on until Schwartz realized that the room had gone quiet. “When I looked over at the cage, the monkey was lying motionless at the bottom. He didn’t seem to be breathing. . . . ‘Tenn, I think your monkey is dead!’ I said. Tennessee slowly moved his gaze from me to the cage, studied it for a moment, then looked back at me and in his slightly drunken Southern drawl said, ‘Why so he is. So he is.’ ”
A week after Merlo was buried, Williams left with Nicklaus for the Mexican resort town of Puerto Vallarta, where John Huston was filming The Night of the Iguana, with Deborah Kerr, Richard Burton, and Ava Gardner. “My heart is heavy, but I couldn’t have chosen a better place, not to forget, but to remember as peacefully as I can,” Williams wrote to Vaccaro, trying to coax her to join him. “The sea is just warm eno
ugh and the streets are full of creatures. Burros, horses descended directly from that horse of Don Quixote, wandering hogs.” He added, “Yesterday I made myself popular by re-writing a scene for Burton and Sue Lyon, which everyone liked. Today I’m re-writing the ending which had been sentimentalized. I’m trying to replace the sentimentality with some honest emotion and the producer, Ray Stark is adding several feet to the speed-boat or fishing boat that he’s offered to pay me with.”
But neither the glamour of the surroundings nor the company worked its distracting magic. “I have been very depressed over the loss of Frank,” Williams wrote to his mother and brother. “It was so awful to watch a young person so full of vitality before slipping so steadily away and trying so desperately not to face it.” “Things were never the same after Frank died,” Nicklaus said. Key West, to which Williams returned with Nicklaus in October, was no longer emollient. “The house, in fact the whole island, is haunted by Frank and our happy years together,” Williams wrote to Wood.
Bound up in his grief over Merlo’s death was a projection of his own demise. (Williams, who was almost always photographed with a cigarette in hand, immediately stopped smoking.) In his mind, Milk Train, which he was revising for a second opening on Broadway within a season after the play’s previous failure—an unprecedented opportunity that he considered “almost a miracle”—became a kind of swan song. He hoped for a stellar, uncompromised production “to conclude my Broadway career.” “I have no more illusions about the Broadway establishment,” he had written to Wood in July 1963. “A writer is valued only as long as he is in current fashion, and I have had my day. I was always psychologically prepared for this eventuality and I think I am able to face it, now that it’s come, having acquainted myself with the fate of other writers like Fitzgerald.”
THE FLAMBOYANT BROADWAY producer David Merrick (nicknamed the “Abominable Showman”), seeing an opportunity to corner Williams’s future output and turn himself into a producer of serious drama, had proposed the restaging of Milk Train to Williams in May 1963. He began his charm offensive by praising the play as “one of your best” and declaring Williams “the greatest playwright, now or ever.” Merrick “liked writers in the way that snakes like live rabbits,” John Osborne, whose plays Look Back in Anger and Luther had been produced by Merrick on Broadway, once observed. Nonetheless, Williams was easily seduced by his flattery. And, like all producers, Merrick paid to play. He hired the British director Tony Richardson, whose film adaptation of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones was one of the year’s cinematic sensations. (“Tony is a man of genius—only a man of genius could have directed that film so fabulously,” Williams said after seeing it.) Merrick’s other big move was to lure back to Broadway the legendary Tallulah Bankhead.