by John Lahr
“Oh, yes, he did give me that bit of false information with quite an interesting smile the first time he called on me here; yes, false it was as his smile was shockingly true. Now, doctor, I know and you know, we both know, that I did not have a coronary, not a silent nor a loud one, before I had three convulsions in one morning while under the skilled, conscientious care of the resident physician here at Friggins; but during and since those three cold-turkey convulsions, I have had and survived two of them, I mean coronaries, the first one during those spasms of my brain-waves, the stabbing pain of it is all that I remember about that first coronary, and I know that I suffered another, a second one, since, when I was pursued by a bitch of a night-nurse into this cubicle where I’m afraid you must be very uncomfortably seated.” . . .
And while I said this to myself, confronting the fact that I was being a son of a bitch, he thanked me for being concerned concerning his comfort.
“Thank you,” I said, “for caring how I don’t sleep.”
Still, Dr. Levy, who “was fully aware of who Tennessee was,” according to Dakin, gradually broke down Williams’s bumptiousness. “He was very clever at motivating him,” Dakin recalled. “He said, ‘Tennessee, if you co-operate with us, you’ll write better when you come out than you did before.’ It was then that he began to cooperate a little bit.” As Williams dried out and slowly returned to his senses, by degrees his privileges were reinstated. In late October, the writing ban was lifted; he was allowed envelopes and a rental typewriter, which had to rest on his bed because the table was too high for it. “The worst may be over,” Williams wrote to Glavin, who was housesitting in Key West. “It was the withdrawal from Doriden. It was a cold-turkey withdrawal.” The letter contained the first signs of Williams’s chastened recovery:
I’m having dinner with Dake tonight—I now have the privilege of dining in a very attractive top-floor restaurant in another (non-psychiatric) part of the hospital, on the condition that I don’t order a drink. It’s hardly credible but I’ve not had a drink for over a month—I believe that’s about how long I’ve been confined. Some nights I can’t sleep at all and I sure miss the presence of a Scotch on the bed-side table. However it’s just as well that I don’t attempt to go into the matter of things that I miss. Well, perhaps I might mention you and Gigi and the little house and—nope, I’d better not remind myself of other remembrances.
. . . The present circumstances are relatively agreeable. Most of the patients appear to be reasonably normal, at least by my standards which are not the strictest. A certain number are taking electric shock treatments. You can tell which ones they are by their dazed expressions. I’ve not been given that kind of shock, probably because my electro-cardiogram shows that I’ve had a serious heart attack, “some time in the last few years.”
I registered here as Tom Williams but Dakin gave a press-release so it’s now widely known that Tennessee is here, too.
I walk quite steadily now and I notice nothing particularly eccentric about my behavior—but when the doctors will release me is something I’ve yet to learn. “We don’t expect to keep you here forever” is the closet approximation I can get out of them. They say they can’t yet trust me to stay off Doriden and liquor, the combination of which was responsible for my general disequilibrium. You know, I really didn’t drink so very much. I rarely finished a Scotch and only had two or three a day. Of course there were the martinis and wine at meals. But the doctors have an exaggerated idea of my drinking habit and seem very skeptical when I tell them I was a minor-league drinker. . . .
I’ll seem quite well when you see me and I’ll be careful thereafter. . . . Take care. I’ve learned it’s necessary.
Around the same time, in the last days of October, Williams made contact with Wood. The gloom seemed to be lifting. He was full of ideas for rewrites of a new short play, Will Mr. Merriweather Return from Memphis?, and a reworking of Tokyo Hotel (“I was obviously quite ill when I wrote that play but stripped to its essence, it could have an original quality and a degree of poetic power”). Williams was coming back to life.
Today, for the first time, the neurologist, Dr. Levy, spoke of my going home (Key West) as something not months away. Perhaps in three weeks I’ll be ready. Just imagine, for a month and a half now, I have existed without a drop of liquor!—I am given countless un-named pills, mostly anti-depressants. Levy says that I have been living in a “fog” of depression for “several years” but that I am lucid now.—The agony has been the sleepless nights. Two or three in a row without sleeping a moment. Withdrawal from Doriden is harder, he says, than withdrawal from heroin. . . . Did you know that Dakin is running for nomination to the Senate? That he has five television sets in his house, two of them in color? What an eccentric family Rose belongs to!
On November 7, almost two months after his committal, Williams stepped out of the hospital and into the light of a lovely Indian summer morning for a sanctioned excursion. He had lost weight in the hospital; his clothes no longer fit. Dakin drove him to a men’s store in the suburbs of St. Louis to replenish his wardrobe. Williams wrote to Lobdell:
I’d planned to get a couple of suits but I felt too nervous, too tense, to spend that much time in the store. So I settled for two pairs of slacks and a red sweater-shirt. Dakin disappeared. I got panicky and shouted for him. He was trying on a suit. I insisted that we leave at once. How selfish sickness makes you! He really needed a suit. He is running on a peace and Civil Rights platform, I’m happy to say. He is on the side of the young. Our country seems to be divided between young and old. It’s a tremendously dramatic confrontation. . . . I hope that some entirely new idea of government will evolve, perhaps it could happen within the framework of democracy that is really democracy. But I must leave polemics to my brother, I am not running for anything but my personal liberation and the night sky in Key West and the morning light in my studio where I can sit under the long slanting window in the ceiling and say to myself: “I have come through, I am home!”—it doesn’t even matter too much if I find myself unequal to the challenge of the typewriter under the skylight. Perhaps it won’t be a challenge, only an invitation, and perhaps I’ll find myself able to accept it. Gears have been shifted, values have been re-assessed. The question is: is there time?
On November 20, Williams was “sprung” from Barnes Hospital a week early. “The prospect of early release makes me feel stronger,” he wrote to Andrew Lyndon, a hard-at-heels Southern writer and former lover of Christopher Isherwood’s who had volunteered to fly with him to Key West after a couple of days’ recuperation at his mother’s house. He added in another letter, “My mind is quite clear, now, I have acquired the poor man’s courage, which is stoicism. I have an awful suspicion that I pity myself, but perhaps that is only human. . . . I’ll have to retire to the little compound and live very quietly. That’s all I hope and pray for. It would seem a miracle to me to achieve that much.”
Settled back in Key West, Williams limited himself to a drink at dinner and only the occasional hour at his typewriter. “Perhaps that’s for the best,” he told Paul Bowles in mid-December. “I had written myself very thin and become dependent on hypnotic drugs to reach my unconscious in order to work at all.” He was also resolute about changing his living arrangements and resolved “to ship Glavin off, preferably to Siberia.” Within a few months of his return, Williams was paying Glavin three hundred dollars a week to stay away from Key West. “With his facile Irish charm, Glavin has this town sewed-up,” he complained to Wood in February 1970. “It is apparent to me that his intention is to drive me out of this house which is the only place where I have known any true happiness since my childhood. (No sobs. Just a statement.)” During Williams’s three-month hospitalization, “without my knowledge or authorization,” according to Williams, Glavin had spent more than twenty thousand dollars redoing Williams’s kitchen and expanding his patio. Williams came to see Glavin more as a symbol of his madness than as a savior from it, “at best, h
e’s pitiable; at worst—sinister!” “Nobody knows the true desolation, the absolute moon-surface emptiness of my life with that humanoid creature who blandly escorted me down and down and down till delivered by my brother to a snake-pit. Would you like me to suggest you set up house-keeping with Dracula?” he wrote to Jo Mielziner, who’d had the temerity to suggest that Williams and Glavin might reunite.
Glavin’s real crime, in Williams’s mind, at least, was the effect he had on Williams’s work. “Tennessee wanted out, he said, because he couldn’t write around Glavin,” Dotson Rader, who lived with Williams and wrote a book about him titled Tennessee: Cry of the Heart, recalled. “He blamed him for fucking up his mind. Tenn was big in giving blame to others.” Williams had returned to his senses; the question he couldn’t yet answer when he entered his writing room for that daily rendezvous with his harried unconscious was whether his muse had returned to him. In a letter to Wood from the hospital, he had confessed that “most of the stuff” he’d finished over the last few years read as if he had been tired when he wrote it. “Dear, dear Tenn,” Wood replied. “You weren’t tired my love—you were way out on a light beam in a world that didn’t exist except in your own confused mind.” Wood preferred not to dwell on the past but to celebrate Williams’s return to sanity. “On to the future—and all the plays you are going to write—and see—and hear—and watch over with both eyes open and a mind going clickety-clack as of yore,” she wrote. “Much love, darling, I am so looking forward to the future.”
CHAPTER 9
The Long Farewell
Time betrays us and we betray each other.
—TENNESSEE WILLIAMS,
Camino Real
On July 7, 1971, the night before the opening of Out Cry—a rewritten and renamed version of The Two-Character Play—at the Ivanhoe Theater in Chicago, Williams, Audrey Wood, Maria St. Just, the director George Keathley, and the actors Eileen Herlie and Donald Madden, who played Clare and Felice, assembled in Madden’s dressing room for notes. Madden had wallpapered and painted the place himself; as a finishing touch, he’d draped a few strands of Christmas lights around the room to give it a festive feeling. The night’s performance, however, put a damper on the stage-managed atmosphere of cheer. Although the response to the first preview had been heartening—some audience members had stood to applaud—the cool reaction of the second-preview crowd had unsettled everyone. The play, according to Keathley, who was holding pages of notes, “was choppy as hell.” “Tennessee had been obstreperous all during the performance, braying loudly at the slightest joke,” Keathley said. “Everyone knew—instantly—that he was very high.”
Out Cry was Williams’s first new production in more than two years. He felt, he said, “sort of like Sister Elizabeth planning to kidnap Kissinger and bomb the Pentagon.” Prior to setting off for Chicago, he had confessed to Oliver Evans that he was “petrified.” “I can’t do a thing now but cut it and people who know her tell me that Eileen Herlie comes on like a bellowing ox in a slaughter-pen, which is hardly a desirable approach to the part of Clare,” he said, adding, “I think I am a bit sick of this whole writing bit now, perhaps I’m just too old for it.”
With Audrey Wood
From the moment he hit town, first in the company of his new best friend, the writer and antiwar activist Dotson Rader, and then with St. Just, whom he flew in from London for the opening—“It’s a cold world without you,” he said when issuing the invitation—Williams was managing his panic with liberal cocktails of Ritalin and Nembutal, a downer that counteracted Ritalin’s amphetamine-like rush. “The results were awful to see,” Keathley recalled. “He would come in giggling in a high-pitched voice, his eyes bulging and looking off to the side while he opened his mouth as wide as he could—as if to stretch the skin. There was incredible tension in every movement. He truly looked like a spastic. It bordered on the grotesque.” Keathley added, “It was uncomfortable. He had moved into a place where he no longer cared. He screamed at everybody.” Because the theater couldn’t afford to pay for newspaper ads to spread the word about its premiere, Keathley took it upon himself to accompany Williams to the all-important media interviews. “He could not respond with any degree of sensibility,” he said. “And still he drank. And still he drugged. And still he sank deeper and deeper into a terrible despair.”
For all of 1970, Williams had hounded Wood about the urgency of producing Out Cry. Wood was emphatic that wherever the play was finally mounted, it was crucial that Williams be present. “We should not again make the mistake of having this play done without the author, as we did in England. If ever a play needed the watching over, every hour of rehearsal, it is this one. I urge you to be here when this work goes into rehearsal,” she wrote to him in November. But by the time the Chicago production began rehearsals, eight months later, Williams had so overshot the runway that he was of little use. “In one of our arguments about the text, Tennessee let it slip that Dotson Rader had said such and such,” Keathley recalled. “So there it was. Tenn was being pumped from the outside by Rader and would listen to no one else. . . . It was not a happy-making situation.” Inevitably during the fraught rehearsals, alliances were formed: Madden sided with Williams, Keathley with Herlie. At several points, Keathley became so frustrated that he broke down in tears in front of the cast.
IN MADDEN’S DRESSING room the night before the opening, the mood was somber. There had been a jubilant dinner after the first preview, but Wood had seemed oddly withdrawn. “Did you notice how Audrey was?” Williams remarked to Lady St. Just. Wood had, as Williams wrote, “an uncanny sense of not only what is good but what will go.” Her reticence now in Madden’s dressing room spoke volumes.
The conversation turned to the play’s excessive running time and to cuts. “Tennessee, I have a thought,” Keathley said.
“What?” Williams snapped.
“Why don’t we cut the references late in the play about . . .”
“Do you think I would introduce something in the first act and not make reference to it in the second act?” was Williams’s curt retort.
“Now, now, Tennessee,” Wood said.
Her maternal tone—her “will to manage, to control her sometimes recalcitrant son,” as Williams described it—always got his goat and fed an ambivalence that he freely admitted to, even when publicly praising Wood. Williams was now of an age as an artist where he felt humiliated by “too much domination, too many decisions for him not made by himself,” and where “he would rather make wrong decisions than accept right ones from someone else.” “Now Williams whirled on her and spat the words out with a terrible anger,” Keathley recalled. “You must have been pleased by the audience reaction tonight. You’ve wanted me dead for ten years. But I’m not going to die,” he yelled. In that shocked and shocking moment, Williams made probably the worst decision of the rest of his life. “I became a sort of madman,” he wrote in Memoirs, omitting any mention of the drug-addled state that had fueled his paranoid rage. Although he insisted that he spoke to Wood with “quiet ferocity,” to the ears of everyone around him, he was screaming hysterically. As a parting shot, according to Keathley, Williams snarled, “And you, you bitch, you’ve been against me from the beginning. I’m through with you. You’re fired!” Williams yanked open the dressing-room door and stormed out.
“No one knew what to say or what to do,” Keathley said. “Although he thought he was making a grand exit, Tennessee had, in fact, gone to the bathroom, and soon everyone realized where he was. We were still silent, each of us, wondering just exactly what Tennessee was going to do. After what seemed like hours, he suddenly threw open the door and, without a word to anyone, left.”
For Wood, and on some level for Williams, the moment was indigestible. “For the first time in all our years together . . . I wanted only to slap him hard on the face,” Wood wrote later. Still, during the outburst, she maintained a dignified silence, refusing her client the pleasure of an extended scene. Once he was gone, her impu
lse was “to get the hell out of there, one, two, three!” Nodding to the embarrassed group, she managed a quick exit. In her retelling of the story, Williams was still within earshot as she hurried away; she heard him say, “That bitch! I’m glad I’m through with her!” “After such a trauma, one needs to find a chair and a stiff drink,” Wood recalled. She found both at the Ambassador East, where she and Williams were staying. Soon after she had gotten settled, Williams rushed into the bar with St. Just in tow. “When he saw I had arrived before him, he went charging out in a further rage,” she said. That night, Wood told herself, “I have been through similar Williams scenes through the years. I am strong. I have humor. The play will open. I can get by for a few days more. I will see him as little as possible. . . . I won’t talk.” Unable to bear the heartbreak and the humiliation, however, the next morning Wood rented a car and driver to speed her away from Williams and Chicago to Milwaukee, where she visited the graves of her parents.
THE NEWS OF Wood’s firing traveled fast. Alan U. Schwartz, Williams’s lawyer, was at LaGuardia Airport about to board a plane to Chicago for the opening night of Out Cry when he got the word. “ ‘Don’t come, or come if you want, but you’re gonna be very unhappy,’ ” Schwartz remembered Wood telling him. “I didn’t go. I was in shock. She came back to New York, and she was in shock.” Schwartz continued, “She blamed a lot of it on Maria.”
As early as 1963, Wood had called St. Just out on her subversive double-dealing. “Dear, dear Maria,” she began,
The world we live in is indeed small. An old friend returning from London the other day apparently saw you during one of your social evenings in London either in May or June. With eyes popping with friendly interest I was told how gleefully you were announcing in London that I no longer represented Tennessee Williams.