Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

by John Lahr

  A few days later, Williams sent up warning flares to Bill Barnes. “The co-habitation with Carroll is approaching its pre-destined finish,” he said. “He is an insupportable drain on my nerves this summer which I must devote to things that restore me such as work, swimming and gentle society. Oh, how home-sick I get for gentle voices and people—I’ve had my share of the opposite.” Williams added, “This sick person continually hassles me about money, pretends not to receive weekly pay-checks insults people quite gratuitously and could isolate me from all agreeable society. I know I’m up-tight about it but I have endured it too long. The bed-sweetness, I’m afraid, is a professional trick. And I can do without it.” By the end of his Positano stay, Williams was living alone. “It turned out that ‘enigmatic’ does not completely describe him,” he wrote to Oliver Evans. “Just before his departure he threatened to kill me.”

  The breakup was a temporary one, however. Back in Key West, that October, Williams wrote to St. Just about Carroll’s latest scene: “The West Virginia Kid suddenly decided yesterday to smash up all his possessions including a camera that cost him $260 in Vietnam and is worth $800 in the States: then practically all his clothes.—I have locked his mss. in my studio to save them from destruction, too.” He added, “Of course you won’t believe this, but his revised book, Old Children, is a terrifyingly beautiful accomplishment: yet he wants to destroy it.” Two years later, when Williams and Carroll arrived in England to spend Christmas with St. Just, she insisted that Carroll be dispatched to Morocco for the holiday. At first Carroll agreed, then “abruptly decided he wouldn’t leave till I did,” Williams said. “The best I could do was to move him to a different hotel—a rather nice one on Half Moon Street. . . . Then one night he went berserk. Got hold of barbiturates, took enough to go into a coma and towards evening they transferred him by ambulance to a public hospital where he broke a window, a door, struck a ‘Sister’ and landed in a straight-jacket in a padded cell.” He added, “For hours I could get very little information about him. Then at last I got him released after paying a large sum in ‘damages’ and he is now back at the Fleming—still sleeping off injections they gave him.”

  In Williams’s descriptions of Carroll’s scenes—at once awful and thrilling—there is a kind of startled innocence. Williams was perpetually grieving for the genuine self who had been sacrificed to his fame. Carroll’s sensational recklessness had the whiff of the authentic; it made a spectacle of all that Williams had lost. “When Tenn was with Robert, stoned or sober, he had to be on his toes, alive, alert,” Rader said. “It didn’t thrill Tennessee, but it brought him into life. It slapped him awake.” Over the years of fights, separations, reunions, and expulsions, the relationship had intensity in place of intimacy. “You see, you had laid a heavy number on the head of the old hound dog,” he wrote to Carroll in the late seventies. “But the dog is faithful of heart and would doubtless tag your heels to the end of the earth if permitted. We are roving creatures, being born of woman, we are full of sorrow and not inclined to long stays. Yet I’ve always wished it could be together, a restless caravan for two.”

  In 1978, on a flight to San Juan, the caravan came a cropper. “Robert seemed to be going through a terrible mental crisis, probably drug-induced, possibly systemic,” Williams wrote.

  He never flies with grass, being afraid of narcs, but crazes himself with booze. On the flight over to San Juan he had six double rums and went berserk. Shouted “This plane is full of Jews!”—which happened to be a true observation but nearly provoked a riot. Then when the handsome young steward refused to serve him more drinks he denounced him as a faggot. Finally, he started hammering on the door to the pilot’s cabin which might have got him shot as a suspected hijacker. It is now clear to me that he can’t leave Key West anymore, unless it is to be for a stay at the Veteran’s Hospital for withdrawal from these angel-dusted joints.

  Back in New Orleans that November, Pancho Rodriguez, the violent man of Williams’s youth, bore witness to the violent man of Williams’s old age. “My beloved Genius is in town for a few days,” Rodriguez reported. “Seems he and Robert arrived in New Orleans ten days ago and as they were checking into the apartment Robert started attacking him, refusing to take Tennessee’s bags upstairs. Before you knew it, Robert was on top of him, Tennessee was yelling for help, and the tenants came out to the rescue. The police came, Robert was incarcerated, but bailed himself out. Ten flew out next morning for California and came back Sunday with the companionship of a very intelligent young man by the name of David Peterson who will remain with him indefinitely. Tennessee claims Robert had been acting up for some time and he had to be put away. I always found him silent and evasive. Of course, there are two sides to every story. It takes two to tango.” Rodriguez went on, “I see the Great One again tonight. . . . Out of all this will emerge another tempestuous, violent masterpiece.”

  Until Carroll was evicted for keeps in the late seventies—“I hope to see you some day when you have proven the strength that I think is latent in you—but not until then. . . . I must avoid further calls upon my exhausted resources,” Williams wrote to him—he lived apart from Williams in a small guesthouse next to the studio by the pool. But the years of ruction and anxiety took their imaginative toll on Williams. “Robert was far more confident of his hold over Tennessee than Tenn was sure of his control over Robert,” Rader said. “And control was what it was all about. . . . Whether intentionally or not, this endless battle for control between Tenn and Robert rendered Tenn incapable of focussed, sustained writing.” Why did Williams endure this emotional storm for so long? To those who lived around him, including Rader, the answer had to do with guilt over his treatment of Merlo. “The banishment of Frank was, along with his silent complicity in Miss Rose’s lobotomy, the most regretted act of his life. He could not forgive himself. He did not want to make the same irredeemable mistake again with Robert,” Rader said.

  “Torito” and Pancho

  Long after the breakup, Williams kept Carroll in mind. He transferred to him the deed to a farm in West Virginia that had been left to him by his painting teacher, Henry Faulkner; in 1980, he took the liberty of correcting the punctuation and syntax of Carroll’s latest novel (“There are not many readers in publishing houses . . . who will see through weak syntax and punctuation and focus on the important thing—a highly original and impressive talent”); and in his will, he left Carroll a yearly sum of $7,500, the only person, besides Rose, to whom he bequeathed money. To the end of his days, Williams dished out avuncular advice to Carroll. “Take care and spit in the face of depression,” he said.

  After Williams’s first split with Carroll in Italy in 1973, Bill Barnes found the playwright a stand-in for the last segment of his trip. Indifference, however, proved to be the galling drama of Williams’s later years. He took personal rejection with more humor than the public variety. “It is true that my charms continue to elude him,” Williams wrote of his new escort, “that expensive hotel doors remain locked between our adjoining rooms. It is true that he took the midnight air with the proprietor of the hotel at Ravello. It is true that he neglected to provide me with my thermos for coffee at four a.m. as well as my little toddy essential to the flow of creative juices, all of these misdemeanors are true as charged, but still he is a highly presentable public companion, he practices a pleasant air-steward’s politeness. . . . When I asked him if he would love me or hate me when we parted, he reflected only a few seconds and then replied: ‘I will remember you.’—What more could I ask? Après tout.”

  To be sensational, that is, to give others a sensation of his internal world, is part of the hysteric’s performance, which Williams had turned into his own art form. But now that he had lost his currency, it was becoming increasingly difficult for him to find an audience. “I have a conviction that I have been professionally assassinated stateside,” Williams wrote to his agent in the spring of 1973, adding, “Maybe I ought to consider myself irrevocably eighty-sixed
out of the States and emigrate to another English-speaking theatre such as Australia—and then England. I’m serious.” Barnes, however, encouraged his new client to take himself and his story on the road. To raise his visibility and his asking price, Barnes proposed that Williams sing the song of himself on numerous national TV talk shows, in a Playboy interview, a memoir, and an autobiographical novel (eventually titled Moise and the World of Reason) in which Williams and many of his famous friends would be incorporated. The novel was “a kind of autobiographical peep show,” Michael Korda, the editor of Moise, wrote. But the autobiography turned out to be the real striptease. Williams had pulled his punches when it came to discussing his sexual identity on television with David Frost. Memoirs would bring him spectacularly out of the closet and answer his critics within the gay community, if not the heterosexual one. “If he hasn’t exactly opened his heart, he has opened his fly,” one droll critic put it.

  Williams was well aware of the spectacle he was going to make of himself. “I am knocking it out at an average of sixteen pages a day and—although I may have to emigrate permanently from the States when it is published—I feel there’s a cool million in it!” he wrote of his memoir to St. Just. To Kate Medina, his editor at Doubleday, he wrote, “I don’t plan to turn out a discreet piece of work in my lifetime. I think that all good literature is an indiscretion.” Williams’s loosey-goosey discursive style and his sexual outspokenness quickly proved a challenge for Medina, whose robust editorial suggestions earned her a charming but firm “dear Kate” letter. “I feel that the project could not interest you unless you were involved in the actual writing or shaping of it,” Williams wrote. “The book can only be successful if it is a work of total and personally unsparing honesty about myself and by myself. . . . The book when finished will not be ‘sensational’ in a bad way but in a good one.”

  Tom Congdon, another Doubleday editor, took over the general supervision of Williams and his manuscript. “You impressed me by your patience and understanding,” Williams wrote to him. “I know, now, that, much as I continue to like Kate Medina, it was best that we all decided that you supervise and advise my work on the memoirs.” Although Williams told the press that his autobiography was the first thing he’d ever written for money, by the time Memoirs was published, in 1975, he was complaining about his fifty-thousand-dollar advance. “I feel I’ve been had for a button,” he said. “I laid my whole life on the line. My WHOLE life.” The memoir received mixed notices, but it was on the New York Times bestseller list for nine weeks. If nothing else, Williams had proved a point: he couldn’t—and wouldn’t—be ignored.

  The great revelation about Williams’s life, however, came two years later, with the publication of Tennessee Williams’ Letters to Donald Windham: 1940–1965, an extraordinary volume of correspondence written before Williams became famous, which expressed the full power of his romantic connection to his life and his talent. Williams considered the letters “amusing and well-written”; they were far more than that. Full of wonder, humor, struggle, and vivid description, the book made a claim for Williams as one of the best letter writers of his time, and certainly the most eloquent among American playwrights. Williams had, twice, given permission to Windham and his partner, Sandy Campbell, for a small private publication, without realizing that he was signing over all rights. When, to Williams’s surprise, the book was commercially published—Windham got a twenty-five-thousand-dollar advance—he was drawn into a public feud with his old friend.

  Williams had cause to feel aggrieved. Windham had promised him galley proofs of the letters before their publication; these were never sent, and for good reason. The extensive (and mischievous) footnotes were full of Windham’s sour critical comment, which Williams rightly found “insulting and damaging.” “What makes a Windham?” he asked in his diary. “Inherent cruelty, I would guess, and that invidious rage that comes from writing well without much financial reward. Does he truly believe that the sketch for ‘Camino Real’ is superior to its final form, and that between the sketch and the final form, I abandoned, or lost, my power and purity as a writer?” Williams went on, “His footnotes and his appendix to my collected letters to him are remarkably venomous to his disadvantage, not mine.” In a mean-spirited review in the Sunday New York Times, Robert Brustein, then dean of the Yale School of Drama and the go-to critic for high-tone put-downs of Williams, gave the letters a homophobic thumping. “The love that previously dared not speak its name has now grown hoarse from screaming it,” he wrote. Although Brustein’s blatant misreading caused much consternation and vociferous squabbling on the Times Letters page, the short-term effect was to mute the reception and the luster of what was probably the major Williams artifact of the seventies.

  The glaring difference between the vivacity of Williams’s early letters and his garrulous memoirs demonstrated an internal sea change: at the start of his career, Williams had survived to write; now, he wrote to survive. “I can’t live in a professional vacuum, I must have new productions to make my life seem worth continuing a while longer—and the big one seems to be still a bit in the distance. Lemme know, lemme know, lemme know!” he wrote to the producer Hillard Elkins in 1974 about The Red Devil Battery Sign, a political allegory begun in the radical upheaval of 1972 and optioned in its first draft in 1973 by David Merrick, who had produced Williams’s three previous Broadway flops.

  With all its dark, conspiratorial political overtones, the play, which is set in Dallas after the Kennedy assassination, allowed Williams to explore his sense of being, like his characters, a dead man walking. (“Did I die by my own hand or was I destroyed slowly and brutally by a conspiratorial group?” Williams wrote in his late “Mes Cahiers Noirs.” “Perhaps I was never meant to exist at all.”) His heroine, named only “Woman Downtown”—the rich, wayward wife of a nefarious industrial kingpin involved in political chicanery who keeps her under surveillance—recalls the corrupt bonhomie of the lavish parties she once hosted as “one big hell-hollering death grin.” “Oh, they trusted me to take their attaché cases with the payola and the secrets in code, and why not? Wasn’t I perfectly NOT human, too?!” she tells King, a bar pickup whose sexual connection to her brings her back to life. “Human!” she shouts, throwing her head back. King, who is struggling to recover from a brain tumor, was formerly the charismatic star turn of a mariachi band called the King’s Men, which featured Nina, his flamenco-dancing daughter. He dreams of singing again and of reclaiming his old glory. “Tonight? I got up on the bandstand with the men and I—sang!” he tells his wife, who has to support him now. “And there was applause almost like there was before. Soon I will send for La Niña and we will hit the road again. Remember her voice and mine together.”

  David Merrick, “the abominable showman”

  In this daydream of corruption and redemption—a hallucinatory vision in which “grief and disease receive little pity, where men live in chronic dread and howl in city canyons like coyotes at the moon,” as Herbert Kretzmer wrote in London’s Daily Express when the play was performed there in 1977—the living dead are briefly shocked into new life. As King dies of a brain seizure, he manages to tell Woman Downtown, “Dreams necessary.” King loses his kingdom on earth; Downtown Woman, wild by nature and truthful in spirit, gains the kingdom of revolutionary immortality. At the finale, the play shifts from impressionistic reality to poetic prophesy. Woman Downtown is still a ghost of sorts, but one who haunts the audience with righteous outrage, joined hand in hand with the spectral protesting young—“outlaws in appearance . . . streaks of dirt on their faces, bloodied bandages, scant and makeshift garments.” The stage directions tell us, “They seem to explode from a dream—and the scene with them . . . eyes wide, looking out at us who have failed or betrayed them. . . . The Woman Downtown advances furthest to where King’s body has fallen. She throws back her head and utters the lost but defiant outcry of the she-wolf.”

  Merrick and Williams struggled to find a director for this
challenging, opaque melodrama, which Williams subtitled in its early drafts “A Work for the Presentational Theatre.” Williams wanted Milton Katselas or Elia Kazan; Merrick was pressing for Michael Bennett, a choreographer-turned-director who was best known at that time for his work on Neil Simon’s Promises, Promises. “He’s just 32—and at that age, how can he dig the depth of life and death which are inseparable from this play? I still love Gadg Kazan,” Williams wrote to Merrick. To Barnes, he said, “In the old days I usually had a director before I had a producer. . . . The director is invariably more objective than the author, especially an author like me who is full of anxiety and uncertainty, who even doubts the sun will come up tomorrow. None of these . . . incontestable facts have occurred to David.”

  Throughout the play’s gestation, Merrick treated Williams like a dead man. For critics to call Williams a ghost of his former self, or even, rhetorically, to declare him “dead,” was par for the course by the late seventies. But for Williams to be treated as invisible by a collaborator was an insult of an altogether different order. Merrick often refused to communicate directly with Williams or to answer his letters. “If the play has not your confidence and I have not your friendship, then maybe I should just concentrate on the approach of the Christmas season and go back to New Orleans and continue work on the play,” Williams wrote to him in November 1973, adding, “I thought we had arrived at the point where you could call me but I still hear nothing from you. . . . This is not the way an important play is prepared.”