118. TLS—1
6/13/57 [Havana, Cuba]
DEAR BOB:
It was harder than I expected to pick up the manuscripts of Orpheus again. I took them to the hospital but couldn’t touch them. I am sure when I get back to New York I can prepare the book ms. in a single morning. Perhaps we could get together for the ceremony and you could take the prepared script away with you. It only involves one or two little inserts and pages removed from one typed copy and put in another with a few notations . . .
I am entering the Austen Riggs Institute, Stockbridge, Mass. on the 18th of this month, to start analysis or psychotherapy there. Will be in Miami till then, or two days before then. Expect to fly up to New York this coming Sunday, the 16th. We could get together Monday. I am most apologetic about this delay but you know what a terrible state of nerves and even worse state of mind I have been in these last two months.
Give Jay my love, if he’s back or you write him.
Love,
Tenn
« • »
the Austen Riggs Institute: It is at the Austen-Riggs Center that TW began psychoanalysis with Dr. Lawrence S. Kubie, which lasted approximately one year.
119. TL—1
January 20, 1958 [New York]
DEAR TENN—
Just a line to tell you that both Ann and I were enthralled by the new play [Suddenly Last Summer]. It really is a smasher, and beautifully acted and directed. I don’t know how you do it, it’s some kind of magic, to make something so poetic and beautiful out of such a frightening theme. It cleaned us both out emotionally, a true katharsis.
I think it will be just about as strong to read, too, and I was glad to hear from Audrey and Bob that we can start right in on the book. I’d like to see a rather unusual format. By that I don’t mean something wildly modern, but a type face that has a lot of character and a design that will set off the poetry of it. I see it as a rather tall and narrow page, with the character names set above the lines of the speeches as is often done for poetic drama. I’ll get a sample page set up to show you what I mean, and hope you will like it.
Audrey has brought up the question of a possible volume which would collect together some of the earlier plays. How do you feel about this now? I recall that the last time we discussed it, some years ago, you felt you preferred the separate volumes, for the time being at least, and wanted to wait. But, you may feel differently now, and we would be keen to tackle it, of course, if you’d like it now.
Did you ever find the statement that you wrote about Purdy’s book? Hope you can turn it up because we want to start a new series of ads and would like to use it. The book is beginning to pull now, and we’re going into a second printing. Purdy tells me that he has been working on a play—experimental in form—but I haven’t seen it yet. He works very slowly and is shy about showing things till he is satisfied with them.
[ . . . ]
That Meacham girl is terrific. I liked her in Jim Merrill’s play, too, but here she has more to work with and throws everything into it.
As ever,
[James Laughlin]
[Typed note from JL to RM clipped to RM’s copy of the above letter:]
Bob—
Trust you approve. Let’s not let Ste[f]an [Salter] do the design. I’d like something really elegant, about the shape of the Watkins Heine, perhaps using a face like Perpetua or Weiss, something rather tall and graceful, and on an interesting stock. Since it’s fairly short, and shd sell well if we can get it right out, I think we can well afford to do something distinguished. Yes?
J.
« • »
collect together some of the earlier plays: First mention of the idea that was realized as The Theatre of Tennessee Williams series in the early seventies.
Meacham girl: Anne Meacham (1925–2006), American actress who originated the role of Catherine Holly in Suddenly Last Summer.
Jim Merrill: James Ingram Merrill (1926–1995), American poet.
Watkins Heine: Heinrich Heine’s The North Sea, translated by Vernon Watkins (ND 1951).
120. TL—1
March 11, 1959 [New York]
DEAR TENN,
I am still limp—pulverized is the word, I guess—from Sweet Bird [of Youth] last night.
They really brought it off. That girl is terrific, and the boy almost as wonderful. They manage somehow to get enough change of pace—between the tragic and the human—so that the intensity is bearable.
And I like the new ending—the direct statement to the audience—this is you, too. And it is. I know. The corruption is in all of us, and our only chance is to recognize it, and live with it.
We want to start on the book as soon as possible and I’ve asked Audrey about getting a script with the new lines in it.
Hope to see you soon. Would you—and Frank—by any chance be free this coming Monday evening—the 16th? Patchen is in town and doing a Poetry-cum-Jazz program with Charlie Mingus at the Living Theatre. It might be fun, and we’d love to take you and Frank to dinner and that if you’d like to.
Bob is in Japan and writes that it’s marvelous.
Best ever,
James Laughlin
« • »
That girl: Geraldine Page (1924–1987), American stage and film actress whose career took off when she played Alma in the 1952 revival of Summer and Smoke, off-Broadway at the Circle in the Square Theater, directed by José Quintero. (See note on Quintero to letter from TW to JL of June 27, 1960.) Page went on to originate the TW roles of Alexandra del Lago in Sweet Bird of Youth (1959) and Zelda Fitzgerald in Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980).
the boy: Paul Newman (1925–2008), American stage and film actor.
Charlie Mingus: (1922–1979), American jazz composer, bassist, and bandleader.
the Living Theatre: Founded by Judith Malina and Julian Beck in 1947, The Living Theatre is the oldest experimental theater company in the United States.
SECTION XII
PF: What do you remember about the infamous Dr. Max Jacobson?
JL: Well, now let’s see. Who was using Dr. Max? Somebody that we knew. Dr. Max, of course, was the doctor of JFK.
PF: Right.
JL: And somebody Bob knew well had had great benefit from these little potions Dr. Max would give his patients. So Bob went to him, and then Bob liked him and Bob thought he was helped by these things and stuck with him over quite a long time.
PF: And he didn’t realize—what were they, amphetamines?
JL: They were little brews. The picture I got of it was that Dr. Max would pour different things out of different little bottles and into the little plastic containers he was giving Bob to take home and take. God knows what was in them. I don’t think that . . . I mean he has the reputation of giving certain people dope, but Bob certainly didn’t think he was getting dope.
PF: He really thought he did feel better?
JL: He did, yes. He felt better. Bob’s big trouble was that he was a reformed alcoholic, and he was sticking to it. He was not drinking at all, ever, but I think maybe, I don’t know, maybe that situation leads to a sort of depression, a physical feeling of lack.
PF: So he felt he needed something to give him a boost?
« • »
Dr. Max Jacobson: (1900–1979), German-born physician who became known as Dr. Feelgood for his “miracle tissue regenerator” cocktail that included animal hormones, enzymes, human placenta, painkillers, steroids, and amphetamines, with which he treated celebrity patients via intramuscular injection. Some side effects of the shots (among others) were mood swings, impaired judgment, and hyperactivity. Though strictly cautioned not to combine the injections with alcohol, TW did and the results left him with weird tics, an irregular heartbeat, and severe paranoia. It was most likely the sustained combination of Dr. Jacobson’s shots, antidepressants, and alcohol that led to TW’s complete physical and mental collapse in 1969.
121. TL—2
June 27, 1960 [New York]
DEA
R TENN,
I thought you’d be amused at this clipping from today’s Publishers Weekly showing that your books will be prominently displayed at the Olympics in Rome.
Are you going to Rome for the shooting of The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone? I gather from one of the papers that Quintero is already on his way there. If you are in Rome during the Olympics I want to see that you meet Sawabo Arioyshi, a young Japanese lady playwright, who has been most of this year on a Rockefeller grant. She is evidently going to cover the Olympics for Asahi in Tokyo. I think you will find her very amusing; she is a pretty good friend of Yukio’s too I think.
Everyone tells me that you and Yukio were very good on television recently, another reason why I think I’m going to have to get a television set. I’m also told that Chris Isherwood pinch-hit for you a week ago, and spoke at length about In the Winter of Cities. That would endear him to me if there were no other reasons. There certainly are many reasons—he is just a thoroughly good person, isn’t he—and I dropped him a note of gratitude.
I imagine you have seen the letters in yesterday’s Times magazine section following the publication of your reply to Marya Mannes. It seems to me that the Times very unfairly published the letters supporting Miss Mannes first, so that those supporting you were all on pages toward the end of the [magazine]. Be that as it may, I was greatly cheered by your reply to her article, and I wondered why we don’t try to publish a volume of your prose pieces. What would you think of the idea? Quite a few are published as introductions to plays, but I can think of quite a few that aren’t, and these pieces would make a very nice little book.
[ . . . ]
Fondly,
Robert M. MacGregor
« • »
Quintero: José Quintero (1924–1999), Panamanian-born American stage director. Quintero directed the 1952 landmark revival of Summer and Smoke at Circle in the Square Theatre in New York and later directed the Broadway productions of The Seven Descents of Myrtle (Kingdom of Earth) (1968), Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980), and the celebrated film adaptation of TW’s novella, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961).
Yukio: Yukio Mishima was the pen name of Kimitake Hiraoka (1925–1970), Japanese novelist, poet, playwright, and actor. ND published three titles by Mishima.
on television recently: Edward R. Murrow conducted an interview with Tennessee Williams, Yukio Mishima, and Dilys Powell for his CBS program Small World, which aired May 8, 1960.
your reply to Marya Mannes: After several years of undisguised contempt for the plays of TW, theater critic Mannes wrote a piece for the New York Times entitled, “A Plea for Fairer Ladies,” in which, among many other complaints, she decried “the public appetite for theater of violence, aberration and decay,” and identified TW as one of the primary purveyors of the kind of theater she felt was ruining Broadway. TW challenged Mannes’s premise with good humor in his own essay in the Times, “Tennessee Williams Presents His POV.” Perhaps his best retort to her insistence on the need for morally uplifting entertainment was, “It is not the essential dignity but the essential ambiguity of man that I think needs to be stated.”
very nice little book: TW’s major essays were later collected by ND in Where I Live: Selected Essays (1978), which was revised and expanded as New Selected Essays: Where I Live (2009).
122. TLS—1
July 26, 1960 [Key West]
DEAR BOB:
Sorry I couldn’t answer your letter quicker but the heat of a Key West summer had all but knocked me out, I could just barely get through my little day’s stint of work. I don’t know what possessed us to pass a summer there. Well, we did spend about six weeks constructing or supervising the construction of a big patio about the house, taking out walls for sliding glass window-doors and putting up “planters” with tropical plants, Etc., and it has become all but impossible to travel with the menagerie of two dogs (one huge black Belgian shepherd who looks like the wolf at the door), a parrot—Frank won’t travel without them and I can’t travel much without Frank and, well, maybe [the] trip around the world last year has killed or at least anesthetized the travel-bug.
About Period of Adjustment. I don’t see much reason not to start on publication whenever you want to. I turned all my revisions over to the director, George Roy Hill, and I know that he has completed the collation of Act One and he said that Act Two will not be substantially altered. However I have not yet been given a copy of this final or semi-final draft. I think you might check with Audrey or Cheryl Crawford about getting a copy for ND. And mention me, too, as a would-be recipient of one.
I have just completed a fairly final draft and assembly-job on Night of the Iguana which goes into rehearsal today in New York for its try-out at the Coconut Grove Playhouse (Miami). It will open there about August 20th with the same cast that played it so beautifully in its shorter version at the Spoleto festival last summer. I think it’s a more interesting and poetic play than Period and when copies are out I will get one to you.
I am tired of writing and writing is tired of me: yet I can’t think of anything else to do. I am like old Aw Boon-Haw, the tiger balm king of the Orient who kept building and building his palaces and gardens till they became grotesque because a fortune-teller told him that he would die when he stopped.
I hope we can have a quiet pleasant evening sometime during the madness of the rehearsal period that starts the middle of September. Frank and I both miss seeing you, and that is not a statement I could make sincerely about many people in New York.
Give Jay my fondest greetings.
Love,
Tenn.
« • »
Aw Boon-Haw: Hô ·Bûn-hó· (1882–1954) was a Burmese-Chinese herbalist who introduced “Tiger Balm” ointment to the West.
123. TL—3
December 9, 1960 [New York]
DEAR TENN,
We are promised copies of the revised edition of Period of Adjustment today, and if one comes along, I will shoot it right to you.
[ . . . ]
Incidentally, all sorts of people have commented to me on the four figures in the wedding band, and I tell them that they are your work of art. Guess you could become a real child artist without even graduating from kindergarten!
[ . . . ]
I’d hoped to have a chance to talk with you further about the idea for The Glass Menagerie that I broached in the middle of 6th Avenue with both you and Audrey looking for cabs. As I said, probably incoherently, the New Classics series in which The Glass Menagerie has been these many years, although it is hardbound with a jacket and only slightly more expensive than paperbound books, has been losing out to the evidently more glamorous paperbooks in all the bookshops. In fact, we find it very difficult to get bookshops to stock the New Classics series at all anymore. Possibly, this is a passing phase, but there it is, and as each title in the New Classics series goes up for reprint, we solve the problem by putting them in paperbound form in our so-called quality paperback series. I think you’ve seen several of them and know what they’re like. The paper is good, and the binding is sewn or perfect-bound, depending on what bindery is doing the job. The covers in the whole series are photographic, and this was the idea of Lustig, although he only lived to design a couple of the covers in the series. Evidently because there are so many covers in paperbound bookshops, our black and white ones stand out, particularly when they’re grouped together, as we always try to have them. We end up spending an enormous amount of time finding just the right photographs or other material, but it’s also a lot of fun and we think it is worth it.
Anyway, we would like to put The Glass Menagerie in this series, and this would mean a sort of new publication with review copies sent out, etc. Incidentally, neither Audrey nor I, who discussed this a fair amount, believe that that The Glass Menagerie will ever be of interest to New American Library, or that kind of paperbound reprint distributed on a mass [market] basis, because the publishers in that field evidently do this when a movie is imminent
and they can have tie-ins. Since The Glass Menagerie has already been made into a movie, that’s evidently that.
[ . . . ]
Anyway, let me know how you feel. I gather Audrey thinks it a good idea.
[ . . . ]
My best to Frank.
Yours,
Robert M. MacGregor
« • »
the four figures: The rough sketch of stick figures on the jacket design for Period of Adjustment was drawn by TW.
more glamorous paperbooks: Early on, JL insisted on calling his paperbacks “paperbooks,” which in his mind indicated quality paperback books (known as trade paper editions) as opposed to the cheaply made, mass-market paperbacks.
will ever [ . . . ] New American Library: ND eventually did lease the paperback rights to The Glass Menagerie to New American Library in 1987, reclaiming them in 1999.
124. TL—1
February 20, 1961 [New York]
DEAR TENN,
Just a line to tell you that I thought the D. H. Lawrence play was really tremendous on TV the other night. I’ve always liked it very much from reading it, but it came out even stronger as they played it. What a wealth of understanding you have packed into that short play. I doubt if any artist has ever understood another so well.
I liked the others too, though I thought The Purification was a bit overdone as they staged it, but the Phoenix [I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix] was really sensational. I hope someone will stage that around New York soon, perhaps with the same cast. I wonder if the woman who played Frieda had ever known her? I thought she had her to the life. I never met Lawrence himself, but that actor seemed just right for him, as I’ve always imagined him.
I hope you are having good weather down there in the islands. We haven’t been able to get away at all as my dear old aunt is still very ill, and we have to stay near her. It’s been quite a winter—I’ve never seen so much snow in Connecticut.
The Luck of Friendship Page 23