Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

by John Lahr

  Into his own struggle for psychic regeneration—“I am too ornery a mother to let go,” he said—the sixty-year-old Williams had absorbed the youth culture’s hankering for radical transformation. Dotson Rader, a baby-faced twenty-nine-year-old writer for the New Republic and other magazines, with a left-wing pedigree that included four arrests for protests against the war, was Williams’s Chingachgook, a raffish guide to this wild political territory. After a teenage breakdown, the Minnesota-born Rader had rebelled against the strictures of his preacher-father’s Puritan fundamentalism and his military-school education and cut out to New York. By the time Williams had met him, he was a contributing editor to the Evergreen Review, America’s foremost avant-garde magazine and part of Grove Press, which published works by many of the firebrands who were fueling the protest movement: Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Abbie Hoffman, Amiri Baraka. Rader was soon to publish a provocative, successful first novel, Gov’t Inspected Meat and Other Fun Summer Things.

  Tall, adventurous, and wayward, Rader knew the counterculture’s high-rollers and lower-riders. Dressed in black leathers, Frye cowboy boots, and a black Rancher hat, which he donned for his nighttime crawls with Williams, he even looked the part of pathfinder. Rader’s curious mixture of fun and ferment made him a controversial figure among some of Williams’s older, stuffier friends, including Vidal, St. Just, and Ruth Ford, but that only added to his renegade appeal for Williams, who enjoyed setting the cat among the pigeons. Rader was, Williams said, “indispensable” to his project of staying contemporary. “You gave me charm and lightness and I love you for it,” Williams told him later.

  Rader was in his full outlaw regalia the first time he met Williams, at a SoHo party, where he was introduced by his friend Candy Darling, the drag queen and Andy Warhol “Superstar,” who was Williams’s date (and who would be cast as a replacement for the hapless and homeless Violet, in the original production of Small Craft Warnings). “We both seemed much older than we were,” Rader said, recounting Williams’s flirtatious opening conversation in his memoir:

  “How much do you get a night?”

  “One hundred bucks,” I replied, playing along.

  He paused, rolling his blue eyes at Candy, his heavy black-rimmed glasses slipping down his nose. “Well, baby, what do you charge to escort an older gentleman to dinner?”

  “Fifty bucks.”

  Feigning shock, he felt in his pockets for money, pulled out a few bills. . . . “Do you suppose we could settle for lunch?”

  “I want to meet your underground friends,” Williams wrote to Rader in August 1971. “Would they take me seriously or just say, ‘Oh, that old fart!’ And put me on? It will not be easy for you to make your friends believe in me as, for so many years, I have passed as an establishment writer because they preferred to see me that way, never bothered to get the message at all.”

  With Rader, Williams went places and met people far outside his usual ambit—young people who didn’t know him or want anything from him. “How liberating that was!” Rader said. “It must have been like when he was young and still unknown and penniless. When people liked him for himself. The affection was disinterested.” The pair spent a lot of time in subterranean New York haunts. “In a night, we’d go to dinner, two-three parties, two-three bars, and pick up people as we went, ending up back at whatever hotel or apartment he was at. The laughter went on until late,” Rader said. “Being places where respectable people thought it unsuitable to be seen, he formed a kind of cockeyed solidarity with those who shared with him a hatred of the rich . . . the cake-eaters who despoil the poor, who eat the earth.” Williams told Rader, “For you . . . being part of the movement has become a bit too familiar . . . but for me it is quite fresh and exhilarating as mountain air.”

  With Dotson Rader, 1972

  Among the things that attracted Williams to the antiwar movement, according to Rader, “was the fact that young people, most especially those committed to media-centered action, made him feel alive, in contact with history, in a way that books and theatre did not.” Through them, he was able to rejoin life and the cultural conversation. “My bringing Tennessee to anti-war and other left events—demonstrations, protests, meetings—didn’t make him radical,” Rader said. “It simply brought him home politically to the place where his heart already was. He detested authority in general, and felt like an outsider with no loyalty to the undemocratic dominant class, which is why he didn’t vote anymore.”

  Williams, who was by his own admission “drifting almost willfully out of contact with the world,” may not have gone in search of the bold-faced names of the counterculture, but he found them. Rader introduced him to leading feminists (Kate Millett, Jill Johnston, Betty Friedan), underground figures (Robert Mapplethorpe, Christopher Makos, Parker Tyler, Charles Ludlam, Gregory Corso, Cal Culver), and uptown grandees (Peter Glenville, Pat Kennedy Lawford, George Plimpton, Ruth Carter Stapleton, Anthony Perkins). Williams also kept company with some of the movers and shakers of the Movement (Dave Dellinger, Tom Seligson, Abbie and Anita Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Carl Oglesby, Gus Hall, William Kunstler). Over time, Dellinger, the radical pacifist, became an admired friend to whom Williams later lent his Key West house. Williams also befriended Eric Mann, of Students for a Democratic Society, and Mark Kluz, who had been imprisoned for his antiwar activities. (Williams thought of these men as “pure revolutionaries,” but in his own political enthusiasms he was no purist. Offered a choice between going dancing with gay friends on Fire Island and meeting Daniel Berrigan, the Catholic priest and activist who was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, Williams chose Fire Island.)

  When New York’s Governor Nelson Rockefeller let the National Guard and state troopers loose on rioting Attica prisoners in 1971, a decision that resulted in forty-three deaths, Williams and Rader joined the outraged public protest. “It is impossible to overstate how morally repugnant the system was in his eyes,” Rader said. Of the Left’s challenge to authority, Williams wrote to Rader:

  It becomes very easy, thinking of it, to abandon hope: but that hope is all that we’ve got: to give meaning to our lives. . . . The bright side is the strength of our moral leadership: the blacks (“We’re willing to do the dying”). The unwavering resolution of Dave Dellinger and the brilliance of his mind, tempered by humanity. That quality in Abbie Hoffman that made me feel in the presence of a holy man. And all our true caring for each other. It really is, for me, a religious conversion, my first one that is socially humanly meaningful. We must be constantly on guard against finks and ego-trippers and opportunists. There are questions we mustn’t even ask, information we must not have, such as: do we have an arsenal? Are we armed at all, in case it comes to fighting for our lives. . . . I am not yet ready to know Weathermen or share their secrets, not because I can’t be trusted but because it is mortal danger to trust almost anybody—the blacks are right about that.

  Inevitably, to raise both money and visibility for the Movement, Williams was drawn into political action by Rader, who was helping put together a massive benefit on December 6, 1971, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The Peoples Coalition for Peace and Justice, which was organizing the event, had gathered a panoply of celebrity supporters in order to break the press blackout on their activities and “to subvert the media image of protesters as a bunch of wild-eyed, drug-crazed violent hippies trying to overthrow the government,” according to Rader. Unbeknownst to Williams, Rader had included Williams’s name on the letterhead of the “Remember the War” Benefit Committee—in a list that included, among other distinguished and outspoken progressives, Rennie Davis, Jules Feiffer, Susan Sontag, Paul Goodman, and Martin Duberman. Williams, however, was balky about being used as bait for the mass media. “I must be rehabilitated as a playwright before I can offer much power to the movement,” he told Rader. “Baby, I am wise as a shit house rat and know what I’m doing. You will hear and see. I got politics in my blood, and you know that I can use it to both our advantage if I do it m
y way.”

  Williams’s way was to write a poem entitled “Ripping off the Mother” for Evergreen Review, and a polemic, “We Are Dissenters Now,” for Harper’s Bazaar—and to donate both fees to the People’s Coalition. In the Harper’s Bazaar piece, Williams railed against “pig-dom.” Invoking the pioneer heritage of his distinguished family tree, he recounted how one of his female ancestors had been scalped by Indians but survived. “Some of her [blood] is still running on through my arteries this morning shouting to you ‘Right on.’ ” Williams continued, “We’re all dissenters now. . . . You don’t have to spell America with a ‘k’ to know the condition it is in. . . . More than one side can cry ‘Charge!’ and surely the side with love for and faith in humanity will finally prevail over those whose faith is only in death and whose love is a lust for blood.”

  Still, Rader pressed Williams for more active participation. He wanted him to speak at the event: the playwright’s first public statement against the Vietnam War would obviously be newsworthy. But Williams proved hard to snare. In mid-November, in desperation, Rader wired him:

  IF WE DO NOT ACT TO END WAR AND RACISM THEN HOW WILL IT EVER END. THE FROST SHOW ON THE 24TH AND THE CAVETT SHOW ON THE 26TH ARE ESSENTIAL. WE CANNOT GET AIR TIME WITHOUT YOU. WE ARE COUNTING ON YOU

  “I am certainly in favor of those great abstractions but the prospect of talking politics is alarming,” Williams wrote to his director, William Hunt. “Being a human centipede I will probably manage to get all 100 feet in my mouth at once.”

  In the end, he capitulated to Rader and came north to do his bit for the People’s Coalition. On the day of the event, wearing a sort of Confederate uniform in a misguided attempt to look young and cool, Williams, accompanied by Bill Barnes and a camera crew from the Canadian Broadcasting Company, who were filming him, arrived to take part in the exercise in radical chic. Williams sat in the fourth row with Rader and the British director Peter Glenville, while Charles Mingus, the Chambers Brothers, Phil Ochs, and Edgar Winter and White Trash performed for the nearly five thousand people who had paid up to fifty dollars a ticket to show their solidarity. A parade of speakers followed: the Episcopal bishop of New York Paul Moore Jr., Gloria Steinem, Ossie Davis, David Dellinger, and Williams. “I am too old to march anymore,” Williams said in his peroration. “No, no!” the audience yelled back. Williams held up his hand for silence. “But I will march on paper!”

  Williams sat down to an ovation. He was followed by Norman Mailer’s forty-five-minute protest play Why Are We in Vietnam?—a work whose profanity on the cathedral’s high altar so offended Williams that he stalked out in protest. “Suddenly ‘The Movement’ was unmasked for me by the Cathedral’s desecration and by the display of shallow exhibitionism,” he wrote later. “By the drugs, the decadence, the spitefulness and finally by the hideous blasphemies of the play.” He remembered the benefit as “probably the most shocking and disillusioning experience of my life, which has contained a great deal of shock and disillusionment.” The event, an organizational fiasco that ended up losing nearly ten thousand dollars, put a crimp in his relationship with Rader and brought a full stop to Williams’s political activism. “I avoided all affiliations of a political nature all of my life till I met you,” he wrote to Rader. “And I’m going to avoid them totally from now on.”

  Still, the rhetoric of the protest movement stayed with him—and was built into his Last Will and Testament, which was written on June 21, 1972, and witnessed by Rader. In it, Williams requested a burial at sea, in the Caribbean, north of Havana, near the spot where Hart Crane took his life. The document instructed that his obsequies were “to be conducted by my revolutionary comrades . . . those desiring freedom from an imperialistic and militaristic regime.” Williams’s jejune quest had led to some enduring and defining emotional knowledge. In himself and in the embattled political world around him—“this ambience of continual dreadfulness”—he registered a growing barbarity. “I was thinking last night . . . that there has been a terrible erosion of the capacity for sympathy and for pity among us all,” he wrote to Rader that July. “So much horror . . . the heart wears out the breast and we stop feeling as we did for each other.”

  THAT PSYCHIC NUMBING found its way into the rewrites of Small Craft Warnings, in a soliloquy delivered by Quentin—a washed-up homosexual screenwriter, in blazer and ascot, who has “a quality of sexlessness, not effeminacy”—that Williams considered “the finest writing I’ve done since the early plays”; it was also the finest he would do in the last decade of his theatrical life:

  QUENTIN: . . . There’s a coarseness, a deadening coarseness, in the experience of most homosexuals. The experiences are quick, and hard, and brutal, and the pattern of them is practically unchanging. Their act of love is like the jabbing of a hypodermic needle to which they’re addicted but which is more and more empty of real interest and surprise. This lack of variation and surprise in their . . . “love life” . . . (He smiles harshly.) . . . spreads into other areas of . . . “sensibility”? (He smiles again.) . . . Yes, once, quite a long time ago, I was often startled by the sense of being alive, of being myself, living! Present on earth, in the flesh, yes, for some completely mysterious reason, a single, separate, intensely conscious being, myself: living! . . . Whenever I would feel this . . . feeling, this . . . shock of . . . what? . . . self-realization? . . . I would be stunned, I would be thunderstruck by it. And by the existence of everything that exists, I’d be lightning-struck with astonishment . . . it would do more than astound me, it would give me a feeling of panic, the sudden sense of . . . I suppose it was like an epileptic seizure, except that I didn’t fall to the ground in convulsions; no, I’d be more apt to try to lose myself in a crowd on a street until the seizure was finished. . . . They were dangerous seizures. One time I drove into the mountains and smashed the car in a tree, and I’m not sure if I meant to do that, or . . . In a forest you’ll sometimes see a giant tree, several hundred years old, that’s scarred, that’s blazed by lightning, and the wound is almost obscured by the obstinately still living and growing bark. I wonder if such a tree has learned the same lesson that I have, not to feel astonishment anymore but just to go on, continue for two or three hundred years more? . . . This boy I picked up tonight, the kid from the tall corn country, still has the capacity for being surprised by what he sees, hears and feels in this kingdom of earth. All the way up the canyon to my place, he kept saying, I can’t believe it, I’m here, I’ve come to the Pacific, the world’s greatest ocean! . . . as if nobody, Magellan or Balboa or even the Indians had ever seen it before him; yes, like he’d discovered this ocean, the largest on earth, and so now, because he’d found it himself, it existed, now, for the first time, never before. . . . And this excitement of his reminded me of my having lost the ability to say: “My God!” instead of just: “Oh, well.”

  Williams went into rehearsals feeling, as he wrote to Bill Barnes, that the play “can do no harm, even if it fails to do good.”

  Still, the rehearsals were fraught. Hunt was dismissed; for a time, until Richard Altman was hired to finish the job, Williams himself served as director. “I certainly had no desire to take over direction, but I felt obliged to since all the stage movements seemed arbitrary,” Williams said. “Someone has just told me that when I took over the direction the leading lady said, ‘Why should I take direction from this old derelict?’ ”

  On Easter Sunday, April 2, 1972, Small Craft Warnings opened at the Truck and Warehouse Theater, near the Bowery, a venue that Williams thought a “metaphor for posterity,” signaling a change in fortune if not in style. The Easter opening worried Williams, for it might give the critics a stick with which to beat him. “They’ll say the Resurrection didn’t come off,” he joked. If Small Craft Warnings wasn’t exactly a resurrection and wasn’t exactly a hit, it was still a comeback of sorts. The reviews were mixed. “The critics in New York are no longer inclined to make allowances for my advanced age nor for the dues I’ve paid,” Willia
ms complained to St. Just after the opening. “They keep saying, ‘This is not up to Williams’ best, such as Streetcar and Cat’—Well, for Chrissake, how could it be? If it were a major play such as ‘Out Cry,’ it would not have opened at the Truck and Warehouse in the Bowery, would it?”

  In fact, the reviews of Small Craft Warnings were sufficiently positive to give Williams hope that the narrative about his work might be changing. Show, a posh short-lived theater magazine, ran a long article subtitled “The Revitalization of a Great Dramatist,” and Clive Barnes’s review in the New York Times concluded that Small Craft Warnings “may survive better than some of the much-touted products of his salad years.” In Time, Ted Kalem welcomed the play as “a five-finger exercise from the man who is the greatest living playwright in the Western world.” “Surely you meant ‘playboy of the Western World’—but never mind,” Williams quipped, when thanking Kalem for his “incredibly beautiful notice.”

  Small Craft Warnings turned out to be Williams’s most successful new theatrical outing in nearly a decade; it played two hundred performances, in a run of nearly six months. That June, when ticket sales dipped, and the actor playing Doc—a doctor who has lost his license to drink but practices clandestinely—left for a four-day film gig just as the play was transferring to the New Theatre uptown, Williams stepped in. “Goddam it, no, I will play it myself!” he told the producers, who took him up on the offer. “A star is born,” Williams wrote to St. Just. “We have played to packed houses. And no cabbages thrown. I guess I have to admit that I am a ham and that I loved it.” Although Williams’s performances gave the show a commercial kiss of life, onstage he was something of a loose cannon, prone to ad lib. “He never shut up,” the actress Peg Murray, a veteran of three of Williams’s late plays, said. The other actors never knew when their cue was coming. “Just watch his lips,” William Hickey, who played Steve, a short-order cook, said. “When they stop moving, you come in.” When nobody was depending on him for a cue, however, as Murray recalled, “he was wonderful in the part.”