by John Lahr
In the first nine months after Williams’s death, St. Just tried to stop many of the productions that the Southeast Banks of Florida had approved, including a cable-TV production of Streetcar with Ann-Margret—a project that had been initiated in Williams’s lifetime. Two months after Williams’s death, Ed Sherin—who held both a letter of support from Williams for a mooted second 1983–84 production of The Red Devil Battery Sign and the agreement of Shirley Knight to play Woman Downtown—wrote to St. Just for permission to mount the play at the Hartman Theatre in Stamford, Connecticut, where he was the artistic director. St. Just said no. If he was shocked that she’d made other plans for the play, St. Just wrote, pissing on him from a great height, she was shocked that he hadn’t expressed any sympathy for the tragic loss of her beloved Tennessee.
Rocco Landesman, then head of New York’s Jujamcyn Theaters, approached St. Just about using Williams’s name for a Broadway theater. “I wanted to name what is now the Walter Kerr Theatre after Tennessee,” Landesman said. “I called Maria St. Just. She talked quite a lot and listened not at all. The gist of the conversation was that if we’d produce ‘Orpheus Descending’ on Broadway, she’d arrange this. Which was too bad, because Tennessee would have had the most beautiful theater in New York named after him. But I wouldn’t submit to blackmail.”
Because of St. Just’s bow-wow caprice, Something Cloudy, Something Clear, a play she disliked because it was “homosexual,” wasn’t published until 1995. A House Not Meant to Stand wasn’t published until 2008. Gregory Mosher, who had moved from being the artistic director of the Goodman Theatre in Chicago to running the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, offered the estate a major New York production of A House, which St. Just declined. “She said, ‘The play is not doable,’ ” Mosher recalled. “I said, ‘You didn’t even see it. How do you know if it’s doable or not?’ ” St. Just was charming and biddable when seasoned British directors, such as Peter Hall or Richard Eyre, came calling, but younger directors who lacked Hall’s and Eyre’s cachet and charm were in for heavy weather. Simon Curtis, then the head of BBC television drama, tried to persuade St. Just to let him produce Stopped Rocking. “She pretended an awful lot,” Curtis recalled. “ ‘Who’s going to write the screenplay?’ she said to me. ‘It is a screenplay,’ I said.”
Since St. Just’s public persona was an elaborate house of cards, any scrutiny was a threat, and she was determined to have a say in the choice of Williams’s biographer. “His personal image has been appallingly tarnished,” she said, of the spate of inadequately researched memoirs about Williams—including his own—that emphasized drink, drugs, and homosexual promiscuity. “I explained to her, ‘All you care about is how you come out of the story,’ ” Gore Vidal said. “ ‘Any biographer will give you the right to censor anything about yourself, since the biography is not of Maria but of Tennessee.’ ” Many biographers were called, and one was chosen. Margot Peters, the author of biographies of Charlotte Brontë and the Barrymore family, worked on a Williams biography from 1989 to 1991. The process did not go smoothly. “She definitely wanted to vet the manuscript,” Peters said of St. Just. “I just kept telling her, ‘Maria, this is my own biography. You’re giving me the rights, but it’s mine. I can’t work if you’re going to vet the manuscript.’ There were some things that she wouldn’t even let me examine. First I could use quotes, then perhaps I couldn’t.” The project was off; then it was on again. Finally, the two women parted ways in a bitter transatlantic phone call. “I would never trust you with him,” St. Just told Peters. Peters screamed at St. Just, “You have ruined Tennessee Williams! You’re ruining him! You’re ruining his reputation! You’re ruining scholarship for him! I wouldn’t work on him or with you for anything in this world!” And she slammed the phone down.
St. Just, an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, adopted the former prime minister’s tactic when faced with opposition: she took no prisoners. Obliteration, not negotiation, was her style. She never mentioned—not even to the “authorized” Peters—that for five years prior to his death, Williams had cooperated with Lyle Leverich, who was planning a two-part biography and who possessed two letters from Williams naming him the authorized biographer and allowing him “full access to my private correspondence and journals.” Williams had first met Leverich in 1976, when Leverich was managing a small San Francisco theater called The Showcase, which successfully produced The Two-Character Play. The following year, Leverich wrote a long letter to the New York Times in response to Robert Brustein’s review of Tennessee Williams’ Letters to Donald Windham: 1940-1965, and Williams wrote to thank him for his support. The next year, over dinner, Leverich suggested that Williams’s own Memoirs had done him a disservice, and proposed that a book be written about Williams’s work in the theater, whereupon Williams said, “Baby, you write it!” In January 1979, Williams instructed Bill Barnes to represent Leverich. Subsequently, he decided that Leverich should be his biographer—a task that Leverich, who had never written a book, accepted. In 1984, shortly after Williams died, Charles Carroll confirmed Leverich as Williams’s official biographer.
Leverich worked on his first volume—Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams—in ten years of relative tranquility. The book was scheduled to be published by Grove Weidenfeld in the fall of 1991. By mid-1988, however, Williams’s will had come out of probate, and St. Just had ascended to her self-appointed role as Williams’s literary guardian. She set out to retroactively deny Leverich permission to publish, on the grounds that Williams’s two letters of authorization did not specifically say that Leverich could quote from correspondence and journals. Leverich contended that he had indeed obtained the required approval from the Southeast Banks of Florida, and had proceeded in good faith since then, but St. Just dismissed Leverich’s work as just another “pirate book.” She took up the matter with Andreas Brown, the owner of the Gotham Book Mart and an appraiser of literary archives who had been hired by Audrey Wood in the sixties to catalogue and appraise Williams’s papers and had resumed the task after Williams’s death. In a letter, St. Just upbraided Brown for helping Leverich and assured him that Leverich would never be the authorized biographer. Brown wrote back to say that he had helped Leverich on Williams’s instructions. Nonetheless, even though Leverich’s publishers thought he had a good case, they were not willing to take on a potentially expensive crusade against the quixotic Lady St. Just. Plans to publish were dropped, and the book was kicked into the long grass.
In another letter to Brown, St. Just laid the responsibility for the estate’s hard line on James Laughlin, to whom Leverich had submitted an early draft of his manuscript for comment. Laughlin returned the manuscript in the spring of 1989, claiming that he was unable to read it because he was coping with fire damage to his Connecticut home. He added, however, that he didn’t think it would “fit into Maria’s plans,” because “she wants something far shorter and with a different slant.” Subsequently, Laughlin wrote to the estate’s lawyer about the biography: “I admired the depth of its research but did not feel that the book had the literary qualities requisite for designation as an authorized biography of Tennessee Williams.”
What had happened? Brown, who knew both Leverich and Laughlin well, wanted to know. “As I recall,” he wrote to Laughlin on June 27, 1990, “Lyle submitted his early unedited draft to you for general comment, not as a screening process for Maria and the estate to accept or reject Lyle’s work as ‘authorized.’ Further, I do not recall your saying at any time during those occasions when the two of us discussed Lyle and his manuscript that you had concluded that his biography did not ‘warrant’ authorization.” Brown got his explanation from Laughlin on a handwritten postcard, postmarked July 5: “The answer is spelled blackmail. Sorry!” St. Just had played her ace. As the holder of the copyrights, she could choose to move any future Williams books to another publishing house or to block Laughlin’s plan to publish a volume of Williams’s letters to him. In May 1992, Laughlin wrote to Leverich,
“I must remain friends with the estate because we have business to do with them, but I don’t like the censorship bit at all.”
Others, including Vidal, lobbied St. Just on behalf of Leverich and academic freedom. “I’ve denounced her,” Vidal said. “I’ve bawled her out. She knew (a) that he was very thorough and (b) that he was onto the abortion thing. And I said, ‘Everybody has abortions, for chrissake. What’s the big deal? It’s not as though you’re in line to be Queen of England, and this might be bad P.R. You’re just an actress—actresses go in for that sort of thing.’ ” Taking matters into her own hands, St. Just went to the Williams archive at the Harry Ransom Center, in Austin, and demanded, as his literary executor, that she be allowed to read his letters alone in a private room. With a razor, she cut out any incriminating words in Williams’s letters. (She didn’t realize, however, that the library kept microfiche copies of every document and could access the excised content.) Leverich wrote to St. Just and offered to “submit for your review and comment” any sensitive material he had uncovered. She never replied. “Maria wreaked havoc on this man’s life,” Brown said. “It’s a real moral crime.”
In 1994, the year of St. Just’s death, and at the end of a three-month New Yorker magazine inquiry into the Williams Estate’s fiduciary and literary high jinx, John Eastman finally allowed Leverich’s biography to proceed to publication. Thirteen years after Williams was buried, the conversation between America’s greatest playwright and the world he’d once bustled in could properly begin. The results of this reinvigorated discussion could be seen at the box office. In 2000, there were 246 productions of Williams’s plays, which earned a total of $1.15 million; by 2011, the number of worldwide productions had risen to 309, and the receipts to $1.4 million.
IN HIS STRUGGLE to unlearn repression, to claim his freedom, and to forge glory out of grief, Williams turned his own delirium into one of the twentieth century’s great chronicles of the brilliance and the barbarity of individualism. In order to name our pain, he devoured himself:
. . . this much will be clear as any of his lost mornings,
that he did own one essential part of a hero,
the idea of life as a nothing-withholding submission of self to flame.
Out of the sad little wish to be loved, Williams made characters so large that they became part of American folklore. Blanche, Stanley, Big Daddy, Brick, Amanda, and Laura transcend their stories—sensational ghosts who haunt us through the ages with their fierce, flawed lives. Williams allowed words to live like anthems in the national imagination: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers”; “Sometimes—there’s God—so quickly”; “Nowadays the world is lit by lightning”; “Make voyages!—Attempt them!—there’s nothing else.”
Grabbing both the brass ring of success and the trapeze of the flesh, Williams swung high and low. His passage through time was sensational. He contended doggedly with his own roiling divided self. In him, until his last breath, the forces of life and death were pitched in clamorous battle. Art was his habit, his “fatal need,” and his salvation. Foraying into those ineffable realms of sensation where language has little purchase, he uncovered our sorrow, our desire, our hauntedness. At the same time, he changed the shape and the ambition of the American commercial theater, which ultimately couldn’t support the paradoxical truth, “the tragic division of the human spirit,” that his stories tried to trap.
In his single-minded pursuit of greatness, Williams exhausted himself and lost his way. “I want to get my goodness back,” he frequently said. If he didn’t find the light, his outcrying heart certainly cast it. “What implements have we but words, images, colors, scratches upon the caves of our solitude?” he asked. In the game of hide-and-seek that he and his theater played with the world, Williams left a trail of beauty so that we could try to find him.
Illustrations
New York, 1948
Laurette Taylor, The Glass Menagerie, 1945
Laurette Taylor as Amanda, with jonquils
Backstage with set painters, A Streetcar Named Desire
Marlon Brando as Stanley and Kim Hunter as Stella, A Streetcar Named Desire
New York, 1948
At Café Nicholson with (from left to right) Tanaquil Le Clercq, Donald Windham, Buffie Johnson, and Gore Vidal
Key West studio
New York, 1952
With Anna Magnani on the set of The Fugitive Kind
With Maureen Stapleton, Orpheus Descending, 1957
With Anna Magnani on the set of The Rose Tattoo
Geraldine Page and Paul Newman, Sweet Bird of Youth
With Maria St. Just, Key West, 1974
Key West
Malibu, 1978
Acknowledgments
I’M AWARE THAT many Williams fans have been waiting a long time for me to cough up this book. A biography takes time; I wouldn’t have been able to rush it even if I’d wanted to. Nonetheless, twelve years from start to finish is pushing the envelope. I’m grateful to have lived long enough to complete this particularly challenging narrative trek. The climb would not have been possible without the generous and loyal support of many others along the way.
I salute: David Aaronovitch, Ginny Agnew, David Allentuck, Katherine Allentuck, Hilton Als, Jesse Angelo, Herman Arrow,* Elizabeth Ashley, Mary Babcock (copy editor), Jonathan Baker, Emilio Banda, Milly S. Barringer, Gregg Barrios, Megan Beatie, Joseph P. Benincasa, Megan Bernard, Georges and Anne Borchardt, Robert Bray, Andreas Brown, Ann Caserta, Mark Cave, Frank Corsaro, Meg Courtney, Jere Couture,* Paul Davis, Josephine DePetris, Mitch Douglas, Julia Druskin, Richard Eyre, Arcadia Falcone, David Finkle, Roy Flukinger, Horton Foote,* Patrice Fox, Peggy L. Fox, Leslie Garis, Lynn Goldberg, Ann Goldstein, Robert Gottlieb, Julie Grob, Harold Guskin, Allean Hale, John Hancock, Cathy Henderson, Kenneth Holdich, Trudie Homan, Anne Jackson, Frances Kazan, Nick Kazan, Thomas Keith (Chronology), Arthur Kopit, Shelagh Kufpfe, Tony Kushner, Jane Lahr, Stanley Ledbetter, Jennifer B. Lee, Margo Lion, Felicia Londre, Zoulema Loup, Sidney Lumet,* James Malcolm, Kendra Malinowski, Lynne Maphies, John Maxtone-Graham, Peter Mears, Mike Medavoy, JoAnne Metsch, Richard Mikel, Seymour Milbert,* Arthur Miller,* Judy Morris, Gregory Mosher, Peg Murray, Linda Briscoe Myers, Mike Nichols, Sean Noel, Richard Oram, Harold Paisner, Jay Parini, Kent Paul, Michael Polonsky, Daniel Rabinowitz, Dotson Rader, Leo Rangell,* Rachel Routh, Michael Ryan, Alan U. Schwartz, Ann Schneider (photo editor), Daniel H. Sheehan III, Ed Sherin, Katie Smither, Declan Spring, Thomas F. Staley, Elaine F. Tankard (research), Margaret Tufts Tenney, John Uecker, Jeff Umbro, Eli Wallach,* Rick Watson, George C. White, David Wilk, Dakin Williams,* Richard Workman.
A tip of the cloth cap also to friends in London’s psychoanalytic community whose conversation and insights over the years have helped to broaden my understanding of Williams: Gregorio Kohon and his paper “Kafka at the Borders,” Donald Campbell, Stephen Grosz, Priscilla Roth. A special shout-out to Christopher Bollas, whose books (Hysteria, Shadow of the Object, Being a Character) and high-spirited gab fests have been a constant source of provocation and revelation.
The New Yorker has been the joy of my writing life. It has also brought many literary angels to my table: Ty Baldwin, my steadfast right-hand man; Jennifer Stahl, the supremo of fact-checkers; and Deborah Treisman, my inspired editor for the last thirteen years whose finesse has been a great gift. The manuscript bears the marks of these experts. At Norton, it was my good fortune to have found a splendid, caring collaborator in John Glusman, the editor in chief of the publishing house and my editor, who has overseen this complex project with elan. The enthusiasm and generalship of Bill Swainson at Bloomsbury, my English publisher, has also been the biography’s good fortune.
As I draw the final curtain on this endeavor, I would like to clasp hands with Lyle Leverich, who started me off, and with my wife, Connie Booth, whose faith in me and the project has kept me going through the book’s long gestation. From the outset of our courtship nearly twenty-five years ago,
Tennessee Williams has been a constant part of our conversation. In her earlier career as a professional actress, Connie played Laura in the 1977 London production of The Glass Menagerie, a performance that was admired by Williams, who came backstage to tell her so. Her intuitive understanding of the man and his family unhappiness informs these pages.