by John Lahr
Nonetheless, for five years until 1970, Glavin ushered Williams through his Stoned Age, that twilight zone in which Williams “elected to be a zombie except for my mornings at work . . . [and] didn’t know if I wanted to live or not.” Glavin accompanied Williams on his daily Manhattan walkabout—to his analyst’s office, to see Dr. Feelgood, to swim at the Y, to lunch at L’Escargot, to the previews of Gnadiges Fraulein at the Longacre, where they sat in a box and laughed uproariously, and where the producer, Charles Bowden, caught them in the men’s room “shooting up with Dr. Feelgood’s amphetamines.” Glavin was bisexual and “very attractive to ladies,” according to Williams. He also had a ruthlessness that made him “perhaps . . . closest to representing Chance Wayne in ‘Sweet Bird of Youth’ in my life.” But Williams’s attachment was more to Glavin’s managerial skills than his erotic expertise. “During our nearly five years together he offered himself to me only three or four times, and, as best as I can remember, I had no carnal knowledge of anyone but him during his time with me.”
“Tennessee made impossible demands on Glavin,” Dakin Williams recalled. “They would go to Europe, and Tennessee would have forgotten his syringes that he’d gotten from Dr. Feelgood. He would accuse Glavin of having stolen them. He would make Glavin pack up and go back to New York with him. Tennessee would find them in his room.” In Williams’s fragile, drugged, paranoid state, Glavin frequently became the object of his boss’s furious projections. Once at lunch at L’Escargot, they got into a shouting match over Williams’s accusations of disloyalty and theft. Glavin walked out, which is when Williams penned his paranoid SOS about being murdered.
In the early days of their relationship, when they were living in separate bedrooms in the thirty-third-floor penthouse at 15 West Seventy-Second adjacent to The Dakota, a pill-popping guest took Williams aside and said, “Tennessee, how do you dare live on the thirty-third floor of a building with a man with eyes like that and with a balcony he could throw you off of.” The next day—“being a madman”—Williams had his furniture put into storage and moved alone into a nearby hotel for a few days, until Glavin discovered his whereabouts and joined him. “[Glavin] probably started, then, to hate me,” Williams wrote in Memoirs. Toward the end of their relationship, Williams gave Glavin a copy of August Strindberg’s Dance of Death, one of his “three favorite modern plays.” In an appended note, he wrote, “It isn’t so much my life that I value but what I live for—my work. In destroying me, you are destroying that, and are you sure you’re worth it? Think hard! And fast! So will I!”
When Glavin rejoined Williams in San Francisco after the Japan debacle, Williams’s paranoid scenes grew so bad that they were turned out of the Fairmont. Williams moved on to New York to oversee the duplication of his scripts and to score a hundred tablets of Doriden, and then to New Orleans for a rendezvous with Pancho Rodriguez. Williams was in free fall, a king dethroned by his critics and divested by his own caprice of imaginative command, sent to wander alone in the wilderness. The gauge of Williams’s melancholy was his rage at the loss. In the poem “Old Men Go Mad at Night” (1973), he looked back at this ugly period of paranoid turmoil and gave brilliant poetic shape to his sense of depleted inspiration:
Old men go mad at night
but are not Lears
There is no kingly howling of their rage,
their grief, their fears, dementedly,
from sea-cliff into storm. [. . .]
No title of dignity, now,
no height of old estate
Gives stature to the drama . . .
Ungrateful heirs, indeed!
Their treacherous seed
Turns them away from more than tall
gold-hammered doors:
Exiles them into such enormous night
skies have no room for it
And old men have no Fools except themselves.
On September 7, 1969, not having spent more than a month in one place for more than a year, Williams straggled back to Key West, with Glavin, whom he promptly sent away for a week. Confused and alone, without even the feckless Glavin on hand for company, Williams sank like a stone. “He never knew where he was most of the time,” his friend the novelist David Loomis recalled. “He staggered. His hands shook. He was incoherent. He’d get paranoiac and scream and shout and cry.” Williams was living under a demented state of siege. He placed a frantic call to his Key West friend Margaret Foresman. “He insisted someone was going to break in the house and kill him,” Foresman said, adding, “He’d call me to come over and check around the house—he was convinced there were prowlers and murderers. He wouldn’t call the police himself, he had me do it—he was used to having people do things like this—and when the deputy sheriff arrived, Williams insisted that someone guard the house all night. All that week he became worse and worse.”
Foresman contacted Wood, who had also been called by Vaccaro; she in turn called Dakin. Having experienced Williams’s capricious rage-outs when he was in this kind of paranoid condition, Vaccaro was chary to intervene. The following week, Williams picked up a Silex containing boiling coffee from a stove that had been set up on the patio while his new kitchen was being installed, then slipped on tiles and scalded his naked shoulder. “The rest is not a blur but is too fragmented and chaotic to be sorted out so far,” he wrote later. The burn was not bad but was sufficient proof to Williams that someone was trying to kill him. “Dakin, an attempt will be made on my life tonight,” he told his brother in a distressed call at ten o’clock that night. “Well, Tom, I can’t do anything about it tonight,” Dakin recalled replying. “Is it all right if I come tomorrow morning?”
The burn may have been superficial, but Williams’s collapse was profound. Dakin saw his opportunity. Using the burn as an excuse, he asked Williams to come to St. Louis, to Barnes Hospital, where a cousin, Dr. Carl Harford, was in residence, a guarantee of proper attention. On the plane, when the flight attendant refused to give Williams more than the two-drink limit in first class, he made a scene. Dakin was forced to leave the plane during a stopover in Chattanooga, to hunt for booze. It was a Sunday; he came back empty-handed. Williams threw a fit. When they arrived in St. Louis, Dakin rushed Williams to their mother’s house, where there was liquor, and Williams was finally pacified.
Photograph by Richard Avedon, 1969
The plan was for Williams to go to Barnes Hospital by ambulance the next morning, but when the time came, Williams balked. Around noon, with Dakin’s intervention and accompanied by Edwina, Williams admitted himself as “Thomas L. Williams” and underwent tests while ensconced in “Queeny Towers”—the deluxe top-floor wing of Barnes. His room, not far from the swimming pool, had blue satin curtains and a large television on which he watched Shirley Booth in Hazel. (“I thought Shirley was making veiled innuendoes about me,” Williams said.) He was allowed to keep his blue kit bag full of pills, speed, and syringes by his bedside table. Propped up on pillows, with a little stocking cap on his head, as Dakin recalled, Williams “thought he was in full control of everything.”
That evening, Dakin arrived with a bouquet of flowers and get-well notes to Williams from his nieces; his mother also reappeared, looking like “a little Prussian officer in drag,” Williams recalled in Memoirs:
There was now, quite clearly, something impending of a fearful nature. I sensed this and scrambled with remarkable agility out of bed and said, “I’m going home right now,” and I ran into the closet to get into my clothes.
“Oh no, Son.”
“You all will drive me right home or I’ll walk.”
I got myself dressed with amazing alacrity, all the while shouting abuse at Dakin.
“God damn you and your two adopted children. How dare you give them our family name.”
Dakin: “I don’t have to sit here and listen to this abuse.”
Now fully dressed and totally out of my mind, I charged into the corridor and down to the elevators. I started to enter one, was blocked in this
escape effort by a huge young man in hospital uniform. He was blond, I remember, with a beefy, sneering face. I somehow slipped past him into the elevator but he wouldn’t let the doors close.
Raging and storming invectives, I rushed back past him to the room where Mother was asking a nurse for smelling salts. Jesus!
Then I lit into her with a vengeance.
“Why do women bring children into the world and then destroy them?”
(I still consider this a rather good question.)
Said Miss Edwina—sincerely?—“I just don’t know if we’re doing the right thing.”
The “thing” to which she was referring was committing Williams to the hospital’s psychiatric ward, the Renard Division. Alarmed by Williams’s state, Dakin had asked his cousin at the hospital for advice on how to handle the emergency. “He told me that I could sign a letter at the hospital admitting him for ten days. After that Tennessee could get out any time he wanted to,” Dakin said. He went on, “Of course, I never told Tennessee that. He had no legal advice. If he’d had legal advice, he could’ve gotten out in ten days which, of course, would have killed him. Ten days would have done him no good at all.”
In Williams’s account of his futile dash for freedom, he was intercepted “by a wheel-chair with straps and by a goon squad of interns. . . . Clutching the flight bag that contained my booze, my pills, my vial of speed . . . I was strapped into the chair and rocketed out of Queen’s Division to Friggins Violent Ward”—Williams’s mocking epithet for the Renard Division. “There the flight bag was snatched from me, and at this point I blacked out.” Williams’s story omits Edwina’s “fainting as Tennessee was being wheeled to the elevator,” according to Dakin. Dakin, who was then running for the U.S. Senate, had come with Bob Arteaga, a photographer friend, who attempted to calm Williams by placing his arm around him. “Who are you?” Williams asked Arteaga. “I’m a friend of Dakin’s.” “I wouldn’t brag about that,” Williams said. As he was wheeled into the elevator, an intern “got behind him and injected him with something in his arm that put him to sleep,” Dakin said.
Technically, according to Williams, he was considered a voluntary admission. “It wasn’t voluntary at all. It was forced. I was given a paper to sign and told that if I didn’t sign it I would be legally committed,” he explained. “I thought it better to sign it, as, technically again, you are in a position to sign yourself out. But how can you do that without your doctors’ and relatives’ permission? I mean approval?” Dakin’s decision, which would cost him his inheritance, kept Williams in the hospital for three months. It also saved his life. The tests revealed that Williams was dying of acute drug poisoning. To get him off the drugs would require a prolonged stay. For Williams, whose life had been ruled by a rebellion against any proposition of control, the idea of such a confinement was repellent and terrifying, “a 2 by 4 situation.”
When he woke up, according to Dakin, Williams’s first words were, “Where am I? At the Plaza?” In the Renard Division, a lock-down ward where he was kept for the best part of a month, his cell was checked “every half hour by an intern—the door would open noisily and a flashlight would be turned on you.” Williams dubbed the place “Spooksville” and “nightmare alley.” He claimed to have been driven crazy by days of sleeplessness. In addition to the intrusive interns, he had been given a whitewashed room (No. 512) beside the incinerator, whose rumblings were another barrier to his getting any sleep on his steel cot. The demented haunted the hallways. For nearly two months of his stay, Williams was not allowed to write letters, to make phone calls, or to receive unopened mail. When a package of books from Elia Kazan was inspected by an orderly before it was handed over—“Hospital policy,” the orderly said—Williams flew into a rage. “Upset the card table and started screaming at the orderly and screaming at me. I didn’t do anything except walk out,” Dakin said, adding, “I was the only one allowed to see him besides the doctors.”
“I am a completely disenfranchised citizen,” Williams wrote to Glavin, when he could. He later claimed to have had three “convulsive seizures” during his withdrawal from Doriden and Mellaril. Over time and retellings, those seizures escalated to “heart attacks.” Williams’s medical files have been destroyed, so the facts of his condition cannot be corroborated, but the emotional thrust of his account, however melodramatically embellished, never varied. “The circumstances under which I was treated were totally unsuitable and demoralizing and would most certainly have destroyed me had I not been so fiercely resolved to complete my life, what was left of it after those convulsions and heart attacks—which Dr. von Stein has told me were altogether unnecessary—in a state of freedom, not behind the bars of a violent ward in a snake pit, in filthy clothes because neither the hospital nor my brother were willing to have my clothes laundered till toward the very end when it became apparent that something in me would prevail,” Williams later wrote to MacGregor. When he was finally allowed to write letters, he titled one of his first, to Wood, “De Profundis 200,000,” drawing an invidious comparison between his own confinement and Oscar Wilde’s ruinous imprisonment. In Williams’s mind, the hospital was a jail, a kind of sadistic internment camp, from which there was no escape and where his literary fame and his celebrated eloquence had no purchase.
In Williams’s accounts of the hospital’s abusive treatment, there is no mention of the cruel abuse that he dished out—the overturned tables, thrown cups, scurrilous graffiti, snarling insults. Nor, in any written account, is there an acknowledgment of the indisputable, not incidental fact that the medical team he vilified gave him back his life and another decade of writing.
Instead, Williams adopted the posture of shanghaied victim, dragooned into a hell of his brother’s making. “I’m afraid I bear him malice, permanently, after those months in the St. Louis snake pit he put me into,” Williams wrote to Paul Bowles after his release in late December 1969. “I suspect he’d love to do it again. Given the slightest excuse. I think the sight of him would freeze my blood.” Two years earlier, Williams had spoken lovingly of Dakin as “sort of a Quixote—my favorite character in life and fiction. . . . Honesty and humor are a rare combo, but Dakin has both.” Now, Dakin was “Brother Cain.” Williams’s hospitalization, he concluded, was “legalized fratricide.” Where Williams saw betrayal, Dakin saw love. He insisted he’d saved his big brother’s life. Many of Williams’s closest acquaintances—Laughlin, Wood, Vaccaro, Stapleton, and Brown, among them—agreed. “I know that you never intended (consciously) to do wrong,” Williams wrote to Dakin in 1970. “And yet how can I forget the day you picked up a post-card photo of Edwin Booth in my Cell at Renard and said, ‘This man’s brother shot Lincoln. I guess he felt his brother had up-staged him.’ ” Williams continued, “It is hardly accurate to say that you ‘saved me’ by putting me in the violent ward of a psychiatric hospital where I had three convulsions in a single morning because of cold-turkey withdrawal under the care of a sadist resident-physician and three pompous neurologists, two of which were indifferent at best, and one of them unmistakably hostile.”
While on the psychiatric ward, Williams had a dream so vivid and extraordinary that years later he included it in his memoir. He saw himself moving slowly down a corridor with a drag queen’s mincing, exaggerated gait and chanting a poem. The recurrent line of each verse was “Redemption, Redemption.” “Redemption from what?” he wondered. Was it about his brother, his homosexuality, his waste of life and talent? “How terribly I’ve abused myself and my talent in the years since . . . I suppose since Frankie’s death,” Williams wrote to his New Directions editors from the hospital. But to pour scorn on his brother and the doctors was easier than to face the losses he’d brought about himself. In his excoriating (and hilarious) prose-poem account of his hospitalization, “What’s Next on the Agenda, Mr. Williams?” (1970), Williams loudly proclaimed his innocence—a riff that demonstrated, among many things, that anger was a great antidepressant. (The two neurologists attending
Williams, Dr. Berg and Dr. Levy, were rechristened here “Ice Berg” and “Leviathan.”)
“You say you do not sleep well.” . . .
“No, I do not sleep well,” I said to this mammoth neurologist, the one of the three that came on with an air of tired but benign intentions, unlike Dr. Ice Berg whose questions I rarely answered. . . . “No, Dr. Leviathan,” I said to this doctor whom I could talk to, “your sleeping medications give me palpitations like the hoof-beats on a fast-track at the derby, and also, every half hour during the night, an orderly bangs my cell door open and flashes his goddamn flash-light directly into my eyes, for what reason I no more know than why they’re giving electric shock therapy to that sweet old lady, seventy-five years old, worn thin as a finger by life but not the least bit senile, who nearly shakes to pieces with terror when she is informed, which is every night, that she’ll be subjected to shock again the next morning.
“She’s not one of our patients,” the doctor said blandly, “so let’s stick to you, Mr. Williams. Now couldn’t it be that you don’t fall asleep because you associate falling asleep with dying?”
“No, Sir, I don’t think so.”
“Perhaps, you don’t think so but you unconsciously feel so.”
“No, I still know what I unconsciously feel which makes it a conscious feeling, if not at night, at least by this hour the next day.”
“What patients think they feel isn’t always reliable here. You know, I think that your brother told you, that you have suffered what’s called a silent coronary which showed up on the electro-cardiogram taken of you before you were admitted to Friggins Division.”