“Edward and I both exist now in a lacuna that is reserved for the writers the world feels no use for,” Tenn said, “but I feel confident that we will again be heard and understood, and I have no doubt that should I again have a place of respect in the theater, it will be because Edward’s hand was offered in helping me from this lacuna. Elia Kazan once told me that perhaps writers are abandoned because, through our work, readers are educated, they become wise to things they never considered before, and now they feel entirely beyond us, or utterly afraid of us. I want you to know that I believe that the corruption of the artist begins when he fails to acknowledge the work of his brethren,” Tenn told me. “I now understand that the theater is so much greater than all of us, still so capable of so much, that we are all needed not only to ensure its survival, but to ensure its relevance.”
Tenn sat up and looked through the notes at the foot of the bed. He failed to find what he was searching for, so he walked, none too steadily, to the desk, where he flipped through some pages that he had fastened with a paper clip. Eventually, he found what he was looking for, and read it to me with the paper clip clenched in his teeth. “I always feel that Edward has placed upon his stage these gorgeously buffed suits of armor—our fellow men, encased in defense and delusion, and they gleam before us, objects of awe and art, but they are, to our surprise, empty. Utterly empty. And baby, to array such beauty before our eyes, shining and lovely and … empty? Well, that is tragedy in my book. Beautiful tragedy.” He cast his eyes farther down the page and read on.
Irene Worth was one of Tennessee’s “spiritual saviors,” a great actress but also a woman who shared with him poetry, quotations that might help ease his mental strain, and a deliciously witty, almost “evil,” imagination. Here, she is about forty years old. (illustration credit 18.5)
“Irene Worth had a beautiful analogy, as she should. Beautiful woman, beautiful actress, beautiful analogy. She heard me out on my description of Edward’s plays, but she thought I was wrong. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I see Edward’s plays as lovely mirrors,’ ” she told Tenn, and to me she elaborated. “Baroque, perhaps, rarely rococo, but lovely. Ornate, heavy, of a craftsmanship we no longer see. We are lured by the frame of this mirror, but our eyes eventually graze toward the subject, which is ourselves, and the reflection is distorted, ugly, frightening. The frame is gorgeous, but the glass bows and distends, until you move the subject at its center, physically and emotionally and dramatically, and the reflection is sometimes perfect and clear, sometimes lovely, with a little deception of placement and lighting, sometimes cruelly exposing.”
“It is not a mirror for the weak of spirit,” Tenn said, “but I have been happy to step in front of it, to step into it, and I hold on to that frame not only for its beauty, of promises of what might be, but for balance, for strength.”
The sun was rising, and we could see it through the curtains. Our time was over.
“Baby, I need to get to sleep,” Tenn said. I stood and immediately wondered if I would be able to walk out of the room, much less drive to Baton Rouge. I was exhausted, dizzy. I began to collect my papers.
“You’ll gather your strength,” Tenn said, “and I’ll gather mine, and we’ll begin the journey. We’ll go to these women and begin our work together.”
He gave me a hug, strong and lingering, and whispered in my ear, “You’ll be fine. Everything will turn out perfectly.”
Tenn walked me to the door, smiled, and then closed me out of the room. I was in a hall that was utterly silent.
I walked several blocks to where I had parked my car. The sun was rising, but it was an overcast day: it looked more like dusk than dawn. I drove out of the city and found that I had the type of exhaustion that rendered me hyperalert: every bird that flew overhead led me to jerk my head toward it, and every car horn left me lurching. At a diner in the small town of LaPlace, I pulled over and went in. The diner was old and well-known in Louisiana and offered gumbo and a vast array of pies. I sat in the diner drinking coffee and reading over the notes I had taken, collating and ordering them. I became transfixed by a rotating display of desserts and lost track of time.
One week before Thanksgiving of 1982, Tenn called me at home. It was nearly ten o’clock at night, and I answered the phone.
“Dixie!”
We had not seen each other for nearly two months, and I had not known how or where to reach him. I had begun to think that our “assignment” might never happen.
“When will you be coming to New York?” he asked. I did not know. I was taking classes and looking for ways to earn the money to make a trip to see him.
“I can get you up here,” he told me. “That’s not a problem.”
I did not want to take his money, and there was no discussion of what, exactly, we would do once I got to New York, but he remained excited about looking up the people whose names he had given me, of deciphering his notes, and revisiting plays he and others had written. To “figure things out,” he kept saying.
He wanted to know if I still had the rosary and if I used it. I told him I had and I thought about the people whose names were assigned to the beads. He asked me to consider calling some of those “beaded” people and asking them to offer their own prayers. I wrote this down, followed by three exclamation points.
“Call me when you have a chance,” he said. He gave me the phone number of his apartment at Manhattan Plaza, as well as the number of the Hotel Elysée. “You can almost always find me at those places. And let me know when you can get here.”
I did not call Tenn, but I began a letter to him, asking what it was he wanted me to do. I needed to know precisely what this assignment was, and how I might possibly find these people and approach them with Tenn’s questions and comments. I read and reread the letter, and I did not like the tone of it: I was dismissive, dubious. I did not send the letter.
Tenn called my home a week before Christmas, but I did not know about the call until he called me again in the final week of January. My father had a habit—infuriating to me and my mother—of not writing down phone messages. We would come home and he would tell us that we had been called by several people, and when we asked who, he always replied, cheerily, that he didn’t remember. “Name some names,” he would say, and we would have to run through the names of those who might have called. On that particular day, my father only mentioned that “a man” had called, very friendly, and wanted to know how we all were doing and to have me call.
When Tenn phoned me in January, he told me about the call and that my father sounded “perfectly nice.” He reminded me that mothers provide dreams but fathers provide “feet and energy: the engine to leave.” Tenn asked me if I had tried to reach any of the people on the rosary beads. I told him I had not. Tenn reminded me that he could provide me with phone numbers and addresses, introductions, but he wanted to get started, he wanted to reach out to those people. He wanted to find out if he had mattered, and to see if he could write again.
I told him I would get to work on it.
I shared my notes with Marian Seldes. She was astounded by what she found within them, and she told me I should get to New York; I should get to Tenn. I told her of Tenn’s drinking and drug use, the fears I had of being in New York City, where I knew few people, and being on this odd assignment with a man I admired but did not trust. In New Orleans, no matter how strange or frightening things might have become, I knew that my car was parked nearby. I could escape.
“There will be a right time,” she told me.
On February 11, 1983, I came home from school and my job. My father told me there had been messages, and he proudly pointed to a pad he had placed by the telephone. There were five names on the pad, one of them reading “10.”
“Who is that?” my father asked.
“A friend,” I told him.
I had never told my mother or my father about the days spent with Tennessee Williams. As far as they knew, I had been with friends, carousing in New Orleans. I st
ill did not feel comfortable telling them about my desire for a writing life and about my time with Tenn.
“What does the message mean?” my father asked.
I looked at the pad and under the “10,” in my father’s neat and distinctive handwriting, were the words “Be my witness.”
“What does it mean?” my father asked again.
I told my father about Tennessee and our time together, about our assignment, about the rosary, and about the people he wanted me to meet, about the people he wanted to affirm him as a writer and as a man and as a friend.
“You have to call him,” my father told me. “You have to do this.”
“I know,” I told him. “I know.”
BY THE END of the month, Tennessee Williams was dead. I was told of his passing by my father, who greeted me when I came home for dinner. My father wanted to know if I had ever returned his phone call; if I had ever made plans to go to him and help him. Yes, I lied, we were in the midst of those plans. I lied to my father out of shame and guilt—both for my failure to respond to Tenn and for my inability to share with my father my dream of being a writer, of becoming someone who mattered, of providing to Tenn—to any friend—one sacred hour. For the rest of his life, my father and I could share our regret at my not being present for Tennessee Williams, and it may have been the one subject on which we agreed.
“When all of this is over,” Tennessee told me as our visits came to an end, “I want you to remember that I am a writer. Above all else, I’m a writer, and writing is all I really care about.” (illustration credit 18.6)
I began to think that there was now a way I could provide this sacred hour to Tenn. Tenn understood boundaries, safe places, what he called “the right mood for the right outcomes.” He always sought out new notebooks and pads and clean pieces of paper to get started, and he needed music in the background to get the fog rolling. “Nothing like the drama of a clean slate, a fresh start,” he had said. “Remember Pavese,” he always said. “ ‘The only joy in the world is to begin.’ One day it will happen,” he told me. “A place that is safe and strong and right for the fog. All of us,” he told me, “are seeking a home, and I don’t mean where we were born, or where we now live and have things, but where we can do the big things, the right things. Where we belong, where we fit, where we’re loved.”
IN THE FALL of 1988, my father told me, with nothing to prompt him but the belief that I needed to leave Baton Rouge and begin my own life, that it was not too late to be a witness to Tennessee Williams; it was not too late to honor his request and to repay the time he had spent with me. I had let down a man who might not have considered me a friend, but who needed one. “Nothing will be right,” my father told me, “until you do this. You’re honor-bound to do this.” Attached to a small mirror in my bedroom was a portion of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets that Tenn had quoted to me, and which contained a dream of his—of finding meaning and a home:
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment …
Tennessee Williams wanted to get home, my father reminded me, and I could honor his wish by capturing “burning moments” with those people who had mattered to him, who had gotten him up in the morning and in front of the pale judgment.
“Be his witness,” my father told me.
My father provided the money for me to move to New York in March of 1989, to begin what he called “getting the man home.” He made the time right, safe, and sound: his great gift to me, and one for which, I now realize, I never thanked him.
Acknowledgments
Follies of God exists because Tennessee Williams took the time to read and answer a letter sent to him from a twenty-year-old rube in Louisiana. I was that rube. For reasons we will never know or understand, Tenn chose to arrive in the French Quarter and offer me an astonishing assignment. It took nearly three decades and a great deal of patience on the part of more than a hundred people to complete this assignment, but I must admit that I would do it all over again. The subjects in this book have my eternal gratitude for braving the vast no-man’s-land of my good intentions.
I have compiled a list of people who were generous with their time and their memories—about Tennessee Williams, of course, but so much more, and what they gave to me infused the book, and I am thankful to them: Yuki Abe, Ellen Adler, Karen Akers, Eileen Atkins, Sylvia Connie Atkins, Kaye Ballard, Anne Bancroft, Barbara Barrie, Barbara Bel Geddes, Betsy Blair, Ronee Blakley, Chris Boneau, Marlon Brando, Dave Brubeck, Iola Brubeck, Betty Buckley, Ellen Burstyn, Zoe Caldwell, Dixie Carter, Florence Chaney, Stockard Channing, Candy Clark, Patricia Clarkson, Tandy Cronyn, Mart Crowley, Agnes de Mille, Sandy Dennis, Colleen Dewhurst, Fernanda Eberstadt, Patricia Elliott, Robert Emmett, Andy Ensor, Barbara Feldon, John Fiedler, Fionnula Flanagan, Ruth Ford, John Gielgud, Anita Gillette, Joanna Gleason, Martha Graham, Lee Grant, Ruth Gordon, John Guare, Tammy Grimes, Alec Guinness, Christina Haag, Uta Hagen, Julie Harris, Roy Harris, Fayette Hauser, Polly Holliday, Dennis Hopper, Janis Ian, Albert Innaurato, Carmen Irizarry, Anne Jackson, Carol Kane, Garson Kanin, Frances Kazan, Anne Kaufman, Lila Kedrova, Thomas Keith, Deborah Kerr, Richard Kilbourne, Shirley Knight, Carole Laskey, Judith Light, Sidney Lumet, Norris Mailer, Marsha Mason, Marlane Gomard Meyer, Duane Michals, Don Millington, Rosemary Murphy, Peg Murray, Vivian Nathan, Paul Newman, Carrie Nye, Jack O’Brien, Tom Oppenheim, Angelica Page, Betsy Palmer, Estelle Parsons, Arthur Penn, Alice Playten, Sian Phillips, Harold Pinter, Ellis Rabb, Lynn Redgrave, Beah Richards, Doris Roberts, David Rothenberg, Sam Rudy, Katherine Sands, Joan Micklin Silver, Anna Sokolow, Maria St. Just, Louise Sorel, Beatrice Straight, Elaine Stritch, Elizabeth Taylor, Sada Thompson, Maria Tucci, Susan Tyrrell, Joan Vaill Thorne, Nanette Varian, Eli Wallach, Nicholas Fox Weber, Elizabeth Wilson, Lanford Wilson, Donald Windham, Joanne Woodward, Irene Worth. Special mention belongs to Ron and Howard Mandelbaum of Photofest, not only for bringing forth an abundance of images, but for not batting an eye when I requested a Kir Royale when asked if I wanted something to drink. They are clearly invaluable and rare people.
Tennessee spoke a lot about Dopp kits one needs on the road, and I had mine, as well as the people who helped me to stock them: Winnie Grissom, Sue Grissom, Robert Grissom, Wanda Smith, Kim Criswell, Molly Haskell, Andrew Sarris, Phyllis Nagy, Sally Kirkland, Edith Soloway, Allie Mulholland, Ron Raines, David Pittu, Alec Burnham, and Rose Byrnes. The principal source of sanity and sustenance was, always will be, and is Dr. Dale Atkins. There were survival jobs along the way, but I was luckier than most. I was employed by women wise and generous and understanding and inspiring: Evelina Emmi Rector of Ecce Panis, Amy Scherber of Amy’s Bread, and Daryl Roth, a producer and lover of theater and people beyond compare. Three of the subjects in this book became cherished friends: Marian Seldes, Lois Smith, and Frances Sternhagen. Without their generosity and belief in me and my work, all those subjects might never have shown up and started talking … and talking. There were women in Baton Rouge, Louisiana—actresses—who prepared me for the two decades of talking: Barbara Chaney Molstedt, Lenore Evans Banks, and Patricia Snow. I will never forget another belle of the South who taught me how to think in a new way: Patricia White Hardee. I am also grateful for two remarkable teachers who taught me about the art of reading and writing: Barbara O’Rourk and Patricia Geary.
Two talented men believed in this book when it was a pile of notes and dreams, and their help was invaluable. Thank you so much Donald Wiese and David Ebershoff for the guidance, the insight, and the company.
Edward Hibbert of Donadio & Olson believed in the book and brought it to Victoria Wilson at Alfred A. Knopf, and it all came together, in all the best ways. With or without a contract, I am going to insist that I have Wilson’s eye for the rest of my life. I am also grateful to the help offered
by Victoria’s staff: Carmen Johnson, Daniel Schwartz, and Audrey Silverman, publishing tyros from Central Casting—if I ran Central Casting.
I hope that I have been a sufficient witness to Tennessee Williams and to the women he truly believed were among the greatest inventions of God. I do remember, however, that Tenn warned me that trying to understand and fully appreciate the gifts of women was a vast and eternal undertaking, and I remain on the job. I also have a dream similar to one Tenn shared with me: “If I should make it to Heaven—and I’m working on it—I will do as I always do: I will look for a woman to explain it to me, experience it with me. And then I’ll find my mother and tell her what I’ve learned. And we’ll laugh. And I’ll be home—again.”
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