Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

by John Lahr

  JL

  London

  October 9, 2013

  * Deceased

  Chronology

  1907 Edwina Estelle Dakin (1884–1980) and Cornelius Coffin Williams (1879–1957) marry in Columbus, Mississippi, on June 3 and then move to Gulfport, Mississippi.

  1909 The couple moves to Columbus, Mississippi, to live in the Episcopal rectory where Edwina’s father, the Reverend Walter E. Dakin (1857–1954), and her mother, Rosina Isabel Otte Dakin (1863–1944), lived. A traveling salesman, Cornelius is on the road for long periods of time.

  Rose Isabel Williams is born on November 19.

  1911 Thomas Lanier Williams III is born on March 26. In the family, he is known as “Tom.”

  1913 The family moves to Nashville, Tennessee, where the Reverend Dakin becomes pastor at the Church of the Advent.

  1914 Cornelius takes a job as a traveling salesman for the International Shoe Company of St. Louis.

  1916 The Reverend Dakin returns to Mississippi in January to become rector of Grace Church in Canton, and St. Mary’s in Lexington, as well as serving as the minister in Durant. During this time, the Williams family lives in Canton.

  Tom contracts diphtheria, almost dies, and is bedridden for at least a year.

  1917 In February the Reverend Dakin becomes rector of St. George’s Church in Clarksdale, Mississippi. The Williams family joins him there later that year, and Tom is enrolled in the first grade for the 1917–18 school year.

  1918 Cornelius accepts a managerial position in the St. Louis, Missouri, office of the International Shoe Company. Edwina and Tom arrive in St. Louis in July. When Rose joins them in September, the children attend Eugene Field Elementary School.

  1919 Tom’s brother Walter Dakin Williams, called Dakin, is born on February 21.

  1920 Tom stays with his grandparents in Clarksdale, Mississippi, for the 1920–21 school year.

  1921 For the next decade, Tom will spend the majority of his summers either in Clarksdale or in the other Southern towns where his grandparents are residing.

  1922 Tom attends Stix School, where he meets his future girlfriend, Hazel Kramer.

  1924 Edwina buys him a secondhand typewriter for ten dollars.

  Tom’s first published story, “Isolated,” appears in Blewett Junior High School’s newspaper, The Junior Life, in November.

  1925 His first published poem, “Nature’s Thanksgiving,” appears in The Junior Life in November.

  Rose is sent to All Saints College in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

  1926 Tom enrolls in Soldan High School in January and transfers to University City High School in June.

  1927 His essay “Can a Good Wife Be a Good Sport?” wins the third prize of five dollars in a Smart Set magazine contest and is published in May.

  1928 While attending University City High School, his short story, “The Vengeance of Nitocris,” is published in an August issue of the pulp magazine Weird Tales.

  Tom’s maternal grandfather Dakin takes him to New York City, where they see the original Broadway production of Show Boat, then board the RMS Homeric for an eleven-week tour of Europe, from July 6 to September 12, with visits to London, Paris, Monte Carlo, Naples, Rome, Milan, and Cologne, among other locations.

  1929 Tom graduates from high school and enrolls at the University of Missouri, Columbia, in September, where he joins the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity.

  1930 His first one-act play, Beauty Is the Word, wins sixth place in a Dramatic Arts Club contest at the university—it is unusual for a piece by a freshman to make it to the finals.

  1931 Tom enrolls at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in September.

  In October he is inspired by Russian actress Alla Nazimova in the Theatre Guild’s touring production of Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra and decides that he will write for the theater.

  1932 He fails ROTC during the spring term and is taken out of college by his father and put to work as a clerk at the International Shoe Company.

  Three hundred miles north of Havana, Hart Crane jumps to his death from the ocean liner Orizaba.

  That November Tom casts a vote for president for the first and last time, pulling the lever for Socialist candidate Norman Thomas.

  1934 Tom continues writing daily in the family attic and while on the job at the shoe company.

  1935 He collapses from exhaustion in January, is relieved from his job at the International Shoe Company warehouse, and is sent to Memphis to spend the summer with his grandparents.

  A “one-act melodrama” by Dorothy Shapiro and Tom Williams, Cairo! Shanghai! Bombay! is performed by local children in July in the Shapiro’s Memphis backyard.

  In the fall Tom audits classes at Washington University in St. Louis, where he meets aspiring poets William Jay Smith and Clark Mills McBurney. Mills introduces Williams and Smith to the poetry of Hart Crane, Rimbaud, Rilke, and others.

  1936 Tom is admitted to Washington University in January.

  In October his one-act The Magic Tower is produced by the Theatre Guild of Webster Groves, an amateur group just outside of St. Louis.

  Attending a touring company of Ibsen’s Ghosts, he sees another inspiring performance by Alla Nazimova.

  1937 In March, the Mummers of St. Louis produce his first full-length play, Candles to the Sun.

  Rose is committed to a psychiatric ward in St. Louis, then diagnosed with schizophrenia at a Catholic convalescent home. In the summer she is moved to a state hospital in Farmington, Missouri, where she is given shock treatments.

  Tom transfers to the University of Iowa in September to study playwriting.

  In November the Mummers produce Fugitive Kind.

  He completes a draft of Spring Storm.

  1938 Williams receives a bachelor’s degree from the University of Iowa in August.

  He begins work on Not about Nightingales.

  He submits his full-length plays and a group of one-acts under the name “Tennessee Williams,” and mails them from Memphis on his way to New Orleans, where he arrives for the first time on December 28.

  1939 He lives in the French Quarter at 722 Toulouse Street until February 20, when he and Jim Parrott leave on a trip to California.

  In August, three one-acts from the series he then calls American Blues wins him “a special prize” of $100 from the Group Theatre. Attention from the prize brings him in contact with Audrey Wood (1905–1985), who becomes his agent.

  His name “Tennessee Williams” appears for the first time in print with the publication of “The Field of Blue Children” in the September–October issue of Story magazine.

  He receives a $1,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in December.

  1940 Williams moves to New York, where he studies playwriting with John Gassner and Erwin Piscator at the New School.

  That summer in Provincetown, Massachusetts, he falls in love with a Canadian dancer, Kip Kiernan (1918–1944); their affair lasts only a few weeks.

  Williams travels to Mexico in August and September.

  The Theatre Guild produces Battle of Angels, which opens out of town in Boston on December 30.

  1941 Battle of Angels closes in Boston after two weeks. The Broadway run is canceled.

  His first published one-act play, Moony’s Kid Don’t Cry, appears in The Best One-Act Plays of 1940, edited by Margaret Mayorga (published by Dodd, Mead of New York).

  1942 Throughout most of 1941 and 1942, Williams keeps traveling, primarily between New York, St. Louis, New Orleans, Macon, Mexico, Jacksonville, and Provincetown.

  At a New York cocktail party in December, he meets lifelong friend and publisher James Laughlin (1914–1997), founder of New Directions Publishing.

  1943 On January 13 a bilateral prefrontal lobotomy is performed on Rose.

  From mid-May to mid-August, Williams works in Hollywood at $250 a week for MGM, where he is assigned to write scripts for Lana Turner and Margaret O’Brien.

  He adapts his draft
play “The Gentleman Caller,” based on his short story “Portrait of a Girl in Glass,” for the screen, which MGM rejects.

  You Touched Me!, co-authored with Donald Windham, opens at the Cleveland Playhouse on October 13.

  1944 Williams’s beloved grandmother Rosina—known as “Grand”—dies on January 6.

  Kip Kiernan dies from a brain tumor on May 21.

  Williams receives $1,000 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

  New Directions publishes twenty-six of his poems in Five Young American Poets, 1944 and the text to Battle of Angels in a literary journal. (Future trade editions of all plays and other writings are published by New Directions unless otherwise indicated.)

  The Glass Menagerie opens to favorable reviews in Chicago on December 26.

  1945 Stairs to the Roof premieres at the Pasadena Playhouse in California on March 25.

  The Glass Menagerie opens on Broadway on March 31 and goes on to win the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best play of the year.

  You Touched Me! opens on Broadway on September 25 and is later published in an acting edition by Samuel French.

  27 Wagons Full of Cotton: And Other One-Act Plays is published.

  The Glass Menagerie is published by Random House.

  1946 Williams lives in the French Quarter of New Orleans with Pancho Rodriguez y Gonzales (1921–1995); they live together for the next two years.

  1947 Williams meets Frank Merlo (1922–1963) in Provincetown that summer. Beginning in 1948 they become lovers and companions and remain together for nearly fourteen years.

  On December 3, A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Jessica Tandy, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden, opens on Broadway to rave reviews and wins the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award.

  1948 Summer and Smoke opens on Broadway on October 6 and closes in just over three months.

  A collection of five one-act plays, American Blues, is published by the Dramatists Play Service.

  Williams returns to Europe for the first time in a decade and meets Truman Capote and Gore Vidal in Rome.

  One Arm and Other Stories is published in a limited edition.

  1949 Williams takes his grandfather and Merlo to Key West, where Williams buys the house at 1431 Duncan Street.

  1950 His novel The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone is published.

  He transfers his sister, Rose, to the Stony Lodge clinic near Ossining, New York.

  The Warner Brothers film version of The Glass Menagerie is released.

  1951 The Rose Tattoo, starring Maureen Stapleton and Eli Wallach, opens on Broadway on February 3 and wins the Tony Award for Best Play.

  The film version of A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Vivien Leigh as Blanche and Marlon Brando as Stanley, is released.

  1952 A revival of Summer and Smoke, directed by José Quintero and starring Geraldine Page, opens Off-Broadway at the Circle in the Square on April 24 and is a critical success.

  The American Academy of Arts and Letters inducts Williams as a member.

  1953 Camino Real, directed by Elia Kazan, opens on Broadway on March 19 and closes within two months after a harsh critical reception.

  1954 Hard Candy and Other Stories, Williams’s second book of stories, is published.

  1955 At the age of ninety-seven, his grandfather the Reverend Dakin dies on February 14.

  On March 24, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Barbara Bel Geddes, Ben Gazzara, and Burl Ives, opens on Broadway. Cat wins both the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award.

  The film version of The Rose Tattoo, for which Anna Magnani later wins an Academy Award, is released.

  1956 The film Baby Doll, directed by Elia Kazan with a screenplay by Williams, is released amid some controversy and is blacklisted by Cardinal Francis Spellman.

  In the Winter of Cities, Williams’s first book of poetry, is published.

  1957 Orpheus Descending, a revised version of Battle of Angels, directed by Harold Clurman, opens on Broadway on March 21 and closes after two months.

  Williams’s father dies on March 27.

  Williams begins psychoanalysis with Dr. Lawrence S. Kubie in June and continues for a year.

  1958 On February 7 Suddenly Last Summer and Something Unspoken open Off-Broadway under the collective title Garden District.

  The film version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by Richard Brooks, is released.

  1959 His final collaboration with director Elia Kazan, Sweet Bird of Youth, opens on Broadway on March 10 and runs for three months.

  The film version of Suddenly Last Summer, with a screenplay by Gore Vidal, is released.

  1960 The comedy Period of Adjustment opens on Broadway on November 10 and runs for over four months.

  The film version of Orpheus Descending is released under the title The Fugitive Kind.

  1961 On December 28 The Night of the Iguana opens on Broadway, where it runs for nine months and wins the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award.

  The film versions of Summer and Smoke and The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone are released.

  Williams becomes a patient of Dr. Max Jacobson, known as “Dr. Feelgood,” who provides him with injectable forms of barbiturates and amphetamines.

  1962 The film versions of Sweet Bird of Youth and Period of Adjustment are released.

  Williams buys a townhouse at 1014 Dumaine Street in New Orleans’s French Quarter.

  1963 The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore opens on Broadway on January 16 and closes after two months due to a blizzard and a newspaper strike.

  Estranged from Williams for nearly two years, Frank Merlo dies of lung cancer on September 20.

  1964 On January 1, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore is revived in a Broadway production starring Tallulah Bankhead and Tab Hunter; it closes within a week.

  John Huston’s film version of The Night of the Iguana is released.

  1965 The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, his revised version of Summer and Smoke, is published.

  1966 Two one-act plays, The Mutilated and The Gnadiges Fraulein, open on Broadway on February 22 under the collective title Slapstick Tragedy and run for seven performances.

  A novella and stories are published under the title The Knightly Quest.

  1967 His initial version of The Two-Character Play plays at the Hampstead Theatre Club in London and is published in a limited edition.

  1968 On March 27 Kingdom of Earth opens on Broadway under the title The Seven Descents of Myrtle.

  A film version of The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, directed by Joseph Losey, is released under the title Boom!

  1969 Tennessee’s brother, Dakin, arranges for him to convert to Roman Catholicism in a ceremony on January 10.

  In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel opens Off-Broadway on May 11 and runs for three weeks.

  Williams is awarded a doctorate of humanities by the University of Missouri and the Gold Medal for Drama by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in May.

  Dakin commits Tennessee to the Renard Psychiatric Division of Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, where he stays for three months.

  1970 The film version of Kingdom of Earth, with a screenplay by Gore Vidal, is released under the title Last of the Mobile Hot Shots.

  In an interview on David Frost’s television show, Williams discusses his homosexuality.

  A book of plays, Dragon Country, is published.

  1971 Williams breaks with his agent Audrey Wood. Bill Barnes assumes his representation; then Mitch Douglas, in 1978; and Luis Sanjurjo, in 1981.

  In a December rally organized by Norman Mailer at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, Williams speaks out against the war in Vietnam.

  1972 Williams is awarded honorary degrees by the University of Hartford and Purdue University.

  Small Craft Warnings opens Off-Broadway on April 2 and runs for a total of six months, first at the Tr
uck and Warehouse Theater and later at the New Theatre, where Williams plays the role of Doc to boost ticket sales.

  1973 Out Cry, a revised version of The Two-Character Play, opens on Broadway on March 1 and runs for just over a week.

  1974 Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed, a book of short stories, is published.

  1975 Williams is presented with the Medal of Honor for Literature from the National Arts Club.

  The novel Moise and the World of Reason is published by Simon and Schuster and Memoirs is published by Doubleday.

  1976 This Is (An Entertainment) opens at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco on January 20.

  The final version of The Two-Character Play (Out Cry) is published.

  The Red Devil Battery Sign closes during its out-of-town Boston tryout in June.

  The Eccentricities of a Nightingale premieres on Broadway on November 23 and runs for two weeks.

  Williams serves as Jury President at the Cannes Film Festival.

  He is elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

  1977 Vieux Carré opens on Broadway on May 11 and closes within five days.

  His second volume of poetry, Androgyne, Mon Amour, is published.

  1978 Tiger Tail premieres at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta, Georgia, and a revised version premieres the following year at the Hippodrome Theater in Gainesville, Florida.

  A selection of his essays, Where I Live, is published.

  1979 A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur opens Off-Broadway on January 10 at the Hudson Guild Theatre, where it runs for a month.

  Kirche, Küche, Kinder runs as a workshop production Off-Broadway at the Jean Cocteau Repertory Theatre.

  He is presented with a Kennedy Centers Honors medal by President Jimmy Carter at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

  1980 Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis? premieres on January 25 for a limited run at the Tennessee Williams Performing Arts Center in Key West, Florida.

  On March 26 his last Broadway production, Clothes for a Summer Hotel, opens and then closes after fifteen performances.

  On June 1 Williams’s mother, Edwina, dies at the age of ninety-five.