by John Lahr
That September, Small Craft Warnings was forced to close, to make way for Oh, Coward!, a Noël Coward musical revue (“a pair of jerks imitating Gertie Lawrence and Nelly Coward in a nostalgic tribute to their—whatever they did,” Williams called it). In the last few days of the run, Williams’s behavior, by his own admission, became alarming. In a rage over the impending closure, he ranted at the theater management in his opening monologue (“A synonym for a manager in the theatre is a con-man—and all playwrights are shits with their back to the wall”) and threw a glass at the audience. In another performance, in a scene in which Doc returns from losing a mother and her baby in a botched delivery and is asked how things went, Williams replied loudly, “Not as bad as they’ll go at the New Theatre tomorrow if they close us for Nelly Coward.” At one performance, when a heavy-set drunk in the audience shouted abuse at the stage, Williams leapt off the proscenium. “We were all terrified,” Murray recalled. “This little round man in his white suit went up to this big guy. ‘You will not insult the artists!’ Tennessee said. It was overwhelming.”
Playing “Doc” in the Off-Broadway production of his Small Craft Warnings, 1972
Earlier in the run, the management had complained about Williams’s failure to project his voice, but toward the end he said, “I was belting out every line like Ethel Merman through an amplifier. . . . I guess I am just getting a bit bored with so-called ‘rational behavior’ now in these ‘vintage years.’ ”
For a decade, drama critics had been reminding Williams that he was a thing of the past; now, some zealous members of the gay liberation movement were also calling him a relic of reactionary times gone by. “Tennessee, look, an army of lovers is beginning to arise. It is being born from among the victims, the queers, the women you were among the first to love,” Mike Silverstein wrote in an open letter on the pages of Gay Sunshine in 1971. “We were queer like you, victims like you. But now we are gay, no longer accepting our victimization, and proudly proclaiming our humanity.” Silverstein, a fan, addressed Williams demanding a new narrative; other activists were less polite, characterizing Williams as a fogy, whose writing had no purchase on homosexual reality.
In a 1972 New York Times article, “Why Do Homosexual Playwrights Hide Their Homosexuality?,” for instance, “Lee Barton”—a pseudonymous writer who had also written “Nightride,” an Off-Broadway drama about a black-white gay marriage—wrote from the perspective of a man looking forward to “the ‘freed’ generation”: “One work of art dealing truthfully with homosexual life is worth a hundred breast-beating personal confessions,” he said, throwing down the gauntlet. “Who really gives a damn that Tennessee Williams has finally admitted his sexual preferences in print. He has yet to contribute any work of understanding to gay theater, and with his enormous talent one of his works would indeed be worth any amount of personal data.” Williams responded a month later in the Village Voice: “I feel sorry for the author. He makes the mistake of thinking I’ve concealed something in my life because he writes under a pseudonym. I’ve nothing to conceal. Homosexuality isn’t the theme of my plays. They’re about all human relationships. I’ve never faked it.”
Years later, in a reply to an annihilating Gay Sunshine review of Williams’s Memoirs, which called his plays “lies” and “complicated misrepresentations of reality,” Williams took issue at length with the “shocking misapprehension of my work” and with the review’s rhetorical incivility, inadvertently underscoring the distance between Williams’s view of himself as the “founding father of the uncloseted gay world” and that of the bumptious new generation:
Now, surely, Mr. Dvosin, you don’t believe that the precise sexual orientation of a character in a play is what gives validity to the play. Is there such a thing as precise sexual identity in life? I’ve never encountered it in sixty-five years of living and getting about widely. Nearly every person I’ve known has either two or three sexual natures, that of the male, the female, and that of the androgynic, which is far from being a derogatory classification to my way of feeling and thinking. Now, a confession: I contain all three. The reason that I have no difficulty at all in creating female characters is because, in my psyche, there is a little congregation of panicky ladies and/or tramps. Why panicky? Because they are confined there. . . . I have always had something to say in my plays, which was more important to the play, to me, to the audiences than the non-existent thing, a precise sexual identity of a character. Have you read my plays, have you seen them performed in the theatre as well as in the usually distorted film-versions? I doubt it, somehow. . . . Finally, can you really think of a reason why a person like myself—one of divided (psychic) gender—should find it difficult or at all disagreeable to write about love, sexual or spiritual between a woman and a man? I tell you honestly, it was always to me as natural as a duck taking to water or a bird to the air. I could say what I needed to say as easily through love-scenes between a man and woman as I could between two Gays: that I swear.
So where’s the lie?
I feel it would be more profitable for you to look for rigidities and repressions in your attitude as a reviewer, in this instance.
Over the years, Williams had been the target of repeated homophobic abuse, both from the press and from the Key West locals. “There are a great many people in this town who don’t like Tenn, who feel that he is a disgrace to the town and who take it upon themselves to ‘punish’ him,” David Lobdell wrote. Junk was frequently thrown over the fence, plants urinated on, eggs and gunshot blasts aimed at the house, obscene calls received late at night, and obscenities shouted from passing cars. “Certain people on the streets look at me as if to say, ‘I know who you are,’ ” Lobdell added.
The threat was real. In the late seventies, while sauntering down Duval Street singing Southern hymns, Williams and Rader encountered a group of five young men seated on a concrete planter on the sidewalk. As they sang, the men accosted them and announced that they knew who Williams was. One of them had a knife. Rader wanted to run and grabbed Williams’s sleeve; Williams shook him off. “My name is Tennessee Williams! And I am not in the habit of retreat!” he said to the punks. Rader was punched in the mouth; Williams was pushed on top of him. Williams and Rader both took a kicking, but Williams had stood his ground. To face down the bullying gay libs—“to whom my heart is committed, categorically, in a bruised-ass way”—Williams adopted the same kind of gallant staunchness. But he was shaken, nonetheless.
On the first day of 1972, he confided to Bill Barnes that the “relentless thing called time” was taking its toll. “I feel like it’s running out on me,” he said. “I feel so OLD,” he told one reporter after Small Craft Warnings opened. “You know people want you to be rejuvenated at sixty-one. One can’t be rejuvenated at sixty-one. One must consider one’s vascular system.” To the Saturday Review, a couple of weeks later, he said, “At sixty-one you do not expect your powers to increase, you know, unless you’re crazy. . . . The power of a writer is very closely related to sexuality, sexual power. Not that I have lost my sexual power. No, that is very persistent. But there is a decline in sexual security, of mental assurance.”
Williams’s insecurity was compounded by the decline of his body, which gravity seemed to be pulling inexorably toward the earth: his eyes, his cheeks, his neck, his stomach were sagging. (“Time had interred his looks,” Truman Capote wrote, in a thinly disguised, malicious portrait of Williams—whom he described as a “chunky, paunchy, booze-puffed runt”—in “Answered Prayers,” which was published in installments in Esquire between 1975 and 1976.) When Williams looked in the mirror, he saw a person he characterized as “fat,” “ugly,” “unattractive,” no longer “presentable with my clothes off.” “Perhaps I’ll have a face-lift—a bit of counterfeit youth, well, at least middle-age, could improve my chances,” he wrote in a late diary. (He eventually got an “eye-lift.”)
In an effort to recover and feed off the memory of his youth, Williams began to write his autob
iography, which crosscut between his current life and his past—“an aging man’s almost continual scuttling back and forth between his recollections and his present state,” he said. He also submerged himself in a new work titled Vieux Carré, a reimagining of his life at 722 Toulouse Street, the New Orleans boardinghouse where his literary adventure and his sexual coming-of-age had begun. This surge of creative energy coincided with a surge in romantic agitation. “My best work was always done when I was deeply in love,” he told the Saturday Review in April 1972. Sometime near the beginning of his adventure with the New York staging of Small Craft Warnings, Williams met a handsome, pony-tailed, twenty-five-year-old veteran who had survived three years of military service in Southeast Asia, and who was writing a novel mostly about Vietnam and “the charm of the Orientals,” Williams said. His name was Robert Carroll. “I was comforted greatly during this time of durance vile by [his] nightly presence . . . and even more so by his daily presence,” Williams wrote to a Washington friend.
“Little Robert,” as Williams called him, was the son of a coal miner from West Virginia, the youngest of nine children who had lost touch with his family. At least that was the story that Williams told and seemed to believe. “Robert was very, very, very quiet about his life pre-Tennessee,” Rader said. Williams was smitten. “He drives well, cooks very well, and is sexually permissive to my occasional wishes,” Williams said. But there was nothing femme about Carroll; he was streetwise, independent, impetuous, and Southern. He looked out at the world over his wire-rimmed glasses with a skeptic’s impudent, practiced indifference. He had disabused himself of all certainties; he was no sycophant. At once un-biddable and untameable, unknowable and unreachable, Carroll appeared to be unimpressed by Williams’s fame, his theatrical milieu, and even, sometimes, Williams himself. A temperamental maverick—“he alternates in moods like mistral and sirocco,” Williams said—Carroll didn’t want to be made over in a relationship; he wanted to be left alone. In fact, when Rader was first introduced to Carroll at a New York party, he noticed that “Tennessee would touch him, and Robert would pull way. Robert sort of kept his distance from Tennessee.” “There was something about him like a coiled cat,” Rader recalled. “You never knew when he was gonna spring. He could turn on Tennessee just as quickly as he could turn on someone who was a danger to Tennessee, which is what Frank [Merlo] was known for. He kind of acted as a bodyguard.”
With Robert Carroll
“My young writer friend, the Enfant Terrible, has been mysteriously difficult,” Williams told St. Just, who thought it “a disastrous and destructive liaison.” But in Carroll’s prickly, paradoxical personality—defiant and depressed, ambitious and impoverished—Williams recognized some part of himself, “a nature I know to be as difficult and torturous as my own.” Years later he would salute Carroll as “Traveller, stranger, son—my friend”; even in the early stages of their relationship, his bond to Carroll was almost filial. In October 1972, he reported “a beautiful dream” in which “I had a new brother, a few months old but already on the streets, hard to keep up with. I loved him very dearly and I remarked to Maria, who was with me, searching for him, ‘He is the only one of us that has the eyes of my grandmother and he’s just a few months old but is already brighter than Dakin.’ ”
Unlike many of Williams’s crew of haphazard companions who were his intellectual inferiors, Carroll had the brains, the backbone, and the vocabulary both to fight and to delight Williams, who compared his imagistic stream-of-consciousness writing to the work of Carson McCullers. For the first time since 1946, when he and McCullers had written at opposite ends of a Nantucket kitchen table, Williams was able to create in the same room as someone else. In New York, Carroll worked on a rental typewriter at the coffee table and Williams at his desk. In Key West, writing in different shifts, they shared Williams’s studio. (Williams also installed Carroll in the Key West “master bedroom,” clearing away the madonna, the vigil candle, the Hindu god, the photo of Rose, and the scarlet silk cloth from the little tabernacle where he’d prayed after his conversion to Catholicism, to make room for the person who seemed to be the answer to his prayers.)
When Williams and Merlo first got together, Williams had lamented, “My name for him is Little Horse. / I wish he had a name for me”; early in the relationship with Carroll, Carroll gave Williams a nickname, one with a typically sardonic kick: “Hound Dog” (for his “cryin’ all the time”). Often Williams’s baying was over the absence of the feckless Carroll, who had a habit of wandering off the compound for days at a time. To Williams, for whom absence was always the route to desire, Carroll’s mercurial nature—intimate and elusive, sweet and abusive, seductive and hard—made him a tantalizing figure. In the unpublished poem “Robert,” Williams wrote:
Where is Robert?
Gone away.
Willingly?
Who can say . . .
Ever lesser
to be known
Living flower
or flower of stone.
In October 1972, while waiting in the early hours for Carroll to return home from a date, Williams wrote a mutual friend, “He got himself a ravishingly becoming pair of black and white striped double-knit slacks, a black t-shirt that sets off his bewitching tan as well as the slacks did his almost incomparable little ass, and after delivering me to the little compound here on Duncan Street, he sashayed off again in our rental car and has yet to return at 6:15 a.m.—I have a dreadful feeling that all of those vigil lights in the cathedral have blown out tonight.”
At once thrilled and pained by Carroll’s comings and goings, Williams sometimes colluded in his companion’s disappearing acts. “He has a young (twenty-year-old) admirer in town,” Williams reported to Harry Rasky, who was making a documentary on Williams that October. “I did not complain when he stayed out all night the first time with the youth: and last night the youth returned at my invitation and I stayed at the opposite end of the pool while the intimacies occurred, not even looking at them, and went to bed while they remained in progress.” Williams went on, “Mais le coeur a ses raisonne que la raison ne connait pas. And when I woke up long past midnight and discovered that they had retired to my studio, I really blew it. I mean it. It blew my mind, and I shouted to Robert, ‘If you don’t get that bitch on his two wheels’—he came on a bike—‘I am going to do it much less pleasantly than you would!’ ”
THE TUG OF WAR between Williams and Carroll was a drama that played out for years, lending eventfulness to what Williams saw as his flat-lining career. In June 1972, in a spirit of capricious desperation, Williams had double-crossed St. Just and Bowden, who for nearly a year, at his instigation, had been hard at work setting up a production of Out Cry in London with Paul Scofield. Instead, with Barnes’s encouragement, Williams jumped at a Broadway production starring Michael York and directed by the British director Peter Glenville. For a while, St. Just stopped speaking to him, and she made a show of returning the copyright of the play to Williams. “All rights, moral, or in writing, have no meaning,” she said. The Broadway staging of Out Cry, which Williams later referred to as “Glenville’s abortion,” was a disaster: devastating reviews closed the show on March 10, 1973, nine days after its opening. “You don’t recover from a failure like ‘Out Cry,’ ” Williams said, adding, “I feel like my writing career is washed up. I go on writing but it means nothing to me.”
Williams’s relationship with Carroll was equally bewildering. Carroll’s moods, Williams reported to St. Just, continued to alternate between “great sweetness to me” and “down-right beastliness of behavior which makes it all but impossible for me to go out with him in public.” Carroll’s unsuitable dress, his surly silences, his habit of introducing himself as a “hired companion” disconcerted Williams and his friends. Despite his feigned indifference to Williams’s fame, Carroll’s impulse to rob Williams of his power, even in a social context, broadcast his envy. In Positano, Italy, for instance, at a lunch party given by Franco Z
effirelli, Carroll ignored the guests and, according to Williams, “just lay there chain-smoking. Franco whispered to me, ‘Maria a ragione’ ”—Maria is right. (St. Just had dubbed Carroll “the Twerp” and had, according to Williams, an “implacable Tartar hatred for him.”) Williams suspected Carroll’s moods were drug-induced. “That ‘grass’ he smokes is making him ‘un peu dérangé,’ ” Williams told St. Just. “A little period of separation seems to be in order since I must not be bugged while ‘Out Cry’ is going on.” Carroll was a kind of psychic shadow of Williams—at his best, a lifeline, and, at his worst, an embodiment of Williams’s own rage at himself. Like Felice and Clare in Out Cry, the two tussled in an unbreakable, confounding embrace.
Williams’s increasing difficulty with Carroll as a travel companion added to his depression. In Bangkok, Carroll not only insisted on having his own room; he wanted it to be in a different hotel. “I said: ‘You find me intolerable.’ He said: ‘I find you repulsive.’—And I said, going into my Blanche bit, ‘Not as repulsive as you’ll be a year from now.’ ” By the time they arrived in Positano at the end of May 1973, the skirmishing had escalated into something like outright war. One night, over dinner, Carroll “was talking persistently about a wish to kill himself,” Williams wrote to St. Just. “I finally got fed up and said, ‘Oh, you mustn’t do that, it would please too many people!’ ”