Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

TENNESSEE

WILLIAMS

  Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

JOHN LAHR

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

NEW YORK • LONDON

Front endpaper of Williams’s copy of
The Collected Poems of Hart Crane
(1933), which traveled with him.

Connie Booth

Deborah Treisman

Georges Borchardt

&

Martha Ruby Lahr

Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit.

—MARK ROTHKO

Contents

1 Blood-Hot and Personal

2 The Heart Can’t Wait

3 The Erotics of Absence

4 Fugitive Mind

5 Thunder of Disintegration

6 Beanstalk Country

7 Kookhood

8 Waving

Drowning

9 The Long Farewell

10 The Sudden Subway

Preface

“The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it,” Oscar Wilde said. The story of Tennessee Williams’s life and work, it seems to me, is a case in point. Since his death, in 1983, more than forty books have been written about him. Much is gossip, much is self-serving, much is academic tracery, almost none of it risks an interpretation, which is the job of criticism. Amid this enormous posthumous production, however, a few volumes stand out:
Tom
by Lyle Leverich provides invaluable, previously unknown details of Williams’s childhood; two volumes of
Selected Letters
(scrupulously edited by Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler) show Williams to be an epistolary, as well as a theatrical, star, though they take his voluminous correspondence only up to 1957; and
Notebooks
(edited by Margaret Bradham Thornton) brings between hard covers Williams’s scattershot but riveting personal diaries from 1936 to 1981—a calendar of pain that charts his “bulldog battle” to claim his freedom, his sanity, and his talent.
Five O’Clock Angel: Letters of Tennessee Williams to Maria St. Just, 1948–1982
, disingenuously edited by the recipient, nonetheless contains Williams’s high-spirited, intimate, and detailed account of many of the highs and lows of their long acquaintanceship. Taken together (along with his youthful letters to Donald Windham, which were published during his lifetime), these books form a kind of global positioning device for the geography of Williams’s roiling interior. The news they bring makes it possible, and imperative, to construct a new map of the man and his work.

As early as 1939, having just acquired an agent, a Rockefeller grant, and a career path, Williams vowed to write plays that were “a picture of my own heart.” Over the decades, as that outcrying heart opened, faltered, and atrophied, Williams stuck to his game plan: “to be simple direct and terrible . . . I will speak truth as I see it . . . without concealment or evasion and with a fearless unashamed frontal assault upon life.” The plays are his emotional autobiography, snapshots of his heart’s mutation. So, to tell the story of the plays is to tell the story of the man, and vice versa. But how to track him?

“The real fact is that no one means a great deal to me,” Williams said in his first-ever, unguarded interview, with the
New York
Times
, on April 22, 1945. He went on, “I’m gregarious and like to be around people, but almost anybody will do. . . . I prefer people who can help me in some way or another, and most of my friendships are accidental.” Williams is at his most alert, eloquent, humorous, vulnerable, and forthright when talking about the one pure thing in his life: his work. In my attempt to bushwhack through his vertiginous paper trail, my goal has been to stick closely, though not exclusively, to the people who meant the most to his theatrical adventure and to whom he spoke his heart: Audrey Wood, James Laughlin, Elia Kazan, Cheryl Crawford, Brooks Atkinson, Donald Windham, Paul Bowles, Paul Bigelow, and Lady Maria St. Just. To create a sense of the immediacy and the drama in his connections to these people and to create a mosaic of quotation and interpretation, rather like that of a
New Yorker
profile, I have intentionally let their voices butt up against one another on the page.

This biography has a strange history. In 1983, primarily on the basis of the success of my recent biography of the playwright Joe Orton,
Prick Up Your Ears
, I was contacted by representatives of the Williams Estate, who asked that I write Williams’s authorized biography and force off the field a tyro by the name of Lyle Leverich, a San Francisco theater producer who had never written a book but whom Williams had, nonetheless, twice authorized, in writing, to tell his story. If the Williams Estate could announce me as the official biographer, the thinking went, the theatricals would refuse to cooperate with this carpetbagger. I had a seven-year-old son and an English wife, and we were living in London: I declined.

In 1994, now the senior drama critic of
The
New Yorker
, I was approached by Lyle Leverich and Andreas Brown, of Gotham Book Mart, who were hoping that I could help liberate
Tom
, Leverich’s completed first volume, from a five-year stranglehold inflicted on it by Williams’s soi-disant literary executor, Maria St. Just. I ended up writing a
New Yorker
profile on the estate’s shenanigans. (Parts of that profile, “The Lady and Tennessee,” appear in an abridged form in this biography.) Through the long process of reporting and the final victorious result, Lyle and I became friends. He asked me if, should anything happen to him, I would finish the job. We may not have held the same views about the psychology of the Williams family or about biography, but we shared a belief in Williams’s greatness and in a mission “to report his cause aright.” So I said yes.

A few years later, on a trip to San Francisco to review a play, I learned that Lyle had died. He had indeed put me in his will; and I was now ready to do the book. But although the biography started out as the second volume of Lyle’s enterprise—I inherited seven FedEx boxes of files and seventy untranscribed tapes (which were, for my critical purposes, largely useless)—it didn’t end that way. In order to reinterpret the plays and the life, I needed to revisit Williams’s childhood and to take a different tack from Lyle’s encyclopedic chronological approach. For this stylistic reason, W. W. Norton has chosen to publish
Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh
as a stand-alone biography.

TENNESSEE

WILLIAMS

CHAPTER 1

Blood-Hot and Personal

Into this scene comes the man of truth—awkward, timid, inept, even with an almost idiotic side. But he is the bringer of truth, the man from whom progress grows. He creates or destroys, there is no middle ground or compromise in him.

—CLIFFORD ODETS,

I suspect my only influences were Chekhov, D.H. Lawrence—and my life.

—TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

On March 31, 1945, at the Playhouse Theatre on Forty-Eighth Street, on the unfashionable side of Broadway, in New York City, the curtain rose on the sold-out opening night of
The Glass Menagerie
ten minutes late, at 8:50 P.M. Tennessee Williams, the show’s thirty-four-year-old playwright, sat in the aisle seat on the left side of the sixth row. Wearing a gray flannel suit with a button missing, a water-green shirt, and a pale conservative tie, he seemed, according to one paper, “like a farm boy in his Sunday best.” Beside him was his friend, and cruising sidekick, Donald Windham, with whom he was collaborating on the romantic comedy
You Touched Me!
A few seats away in the same row, his chic, diminutive agent, Audrey Wood, sat clutching the hand of the renowned set designer Robert Edmond Jones, her escort for the evening. At the clumsy dress rehearsal the day before, an aphorism of William Liebling, her husband and business partner, kept playing through her mind—“You’re only as good as the night they catch you.” At the dress rehearsal, as the cast got their notes, the play’s tyro producer Louis Singer slid beside her. “Tell me—you are supposed to know a great deal about theater—is this or is it not the worst dress rehearsal you’ve seen in your life?” he said. Words, for once, failed Wood. She nodded a vigorous yes.

Wood fiercely believed in Williams and in her own instincts. Her father, William Wood, a theater manager, had exposed her at a young age to the art and business of vaudeville and theater; the agency that she founded with Liebling in 1937 would come to represent some of the most influential theatricals in the industry: William Inge, Carson McCullers, Robert Anderson, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Paul Newman, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Natalie Wood, Elia Kazan, and Joshua Logan among them. But Williams, her client of six years, had not yet known success. On April Fool’s Day, 1939, tipped off to his talent, Wood had written the unknown author, “It seems to me, from what I’ve heard about you, that you may be exactly the kind of author whom I might help.” She judged him “not a finished dramatist” but “highly promising.” By May of that year, Williams had joined forces with Wood, who promptly sold one of his short stories to
Story
magazine. “You are playing a very long shot when you take an interest in my work,” Williams wrote her. So it had proved. More than anyone in the Broadway audience that opening night, Wood understood the precariousness of his situation. “I’d reached the very, very bottom,” Williams said, recalling his state of mind. “I couldn’t have gone on with these hand-to-mouth jobs, these jobs for which I had no aptitude, like waiting on tables, running elevators, and even being a teletype operator. . . . I couldn’t have made it for another year, I don’t think.”

Eddie Dowling, a jug-eared fifty-one-year-old actor, was improbably cast as Tom Wingfield, the play’s young narrator. He was also the show’s co-director and co-producer. Standing in front of set designer Jo Mielziner’s transparent fourth wall—a see-through scrim that evoked the delicate moods of the play by allowing the exterior of the alley and the fire escape to be lit both separately and simultaneously with the shabby genteel interior of the Wingfield apartment, Dowling went into the opening speech. “Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve,” the Narrator said, brazenly announcing Williams’s visionary powers. “But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you the truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion. To begin with I turn back time.”

William Liebling and Audrey Wood, 1942

As the lights faded out on Dowling, they faded in on Laurette Taylor as Amanda, the matriarch of the hapless Wingfield family, entering upstage into the apartment’s dining room. The reception for Taylor, who had made her Broadway debut in 1903 at the age of sixteen and had been a full-fledged star for more than thirty years, was deafening. On the eve of her sixty-first birthday, she was returning to Broadway after a five-year hiatus. Her rustication was the aftermath of an Actors’ Equity suspension for drunkenly disrupting and closing a play. The death of her playwright husband, Hartley Manners, in 1928, had sent Taylor “on the longest wake in history,” as she liked to joke. “She’d closed many a show on opening night. The managers despised her, and they thought I was crazy entirely to have anything to do with her,” Dowling said. Management might have been wary of Taylor—“the alcoholic of alcoholics,” as she was known on the Rialto—but the public’s loyalty was rock solid. “Nothing like this we’d ever heard before. And so it thwarted the action a little bit, and it threw her. It really threw her,” Dowling recalled about the barrage of applause that greeted Taylor. To fill the stage time and to settle the audience, Taylor brushed the hair out of her eyes and talked into the telephone. “It’s Amanda,” she said, holding the receiver in her hand—vamping until the applause died down—“It’s Amanda. And I’ve got to talk to you.” Finally the audience grew quiet. “This was just about the time I came through the door and said, ‘Ma, I’ve got good news for you,’ ” Dowling recalled. “Instead of giving me the right answer, she took me into the second act.”

WOOD HAD ASKED Dowling to direct
The Glass Menagerie
because of his success staging William Saroyan’s delicate and poetic
The Time of Your Life
in 1939. When she rushed him the slender, fifty-page script, Dowling was two weeks into casting a play called
The Passionate Congressman
. “Audrey I love the play that you sent me and I’ll buy it,” he told her. “Buy it for what?” Wood asked. “I said, ‘We’ll do it as a play.’ She said, ‘Will you put a curtain raiser in front of it? It’s too short.’ I said, ‘We’ll do no such thing. We’ll make it ‘long enough.’ ” Dowling added: “Send the boy around.”