Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (77 page)

A telltale clue to St. Just’s culpability in the Wood-Williams breakup is her silence about it. St. Just was in the room at the time of the firing and by Williams’s side immediately afterward. She also lived on the same floor with him at the hotel, so “she could share the use of my suite which includes parlor, kitchen and a nice little dining room so that I can ‘eat in.’ . . . I have developed a taste for cooking and Maria is good at it, too.” However, at this pivotal event in Williams’s career, in
Five O’Clock Angel
—her self-aggrandizing collection of Williams’s correspondence, in which in an astonishing act of ventriloquism she is both the subject of the narrative and the omniscient narrator—St. Just puts herself in the room but nowhere near the scene.

For the first three months of 1970, Williams had been full of gratitude for his sobriety and for Wood. “I find myself thinking of you often and with the deepest respect and with an affection I have reserved in my life for fewer persons than I could count on the fingers of one hand,” he wrote to her in March, adding, “Time draws short. . . . We must be careful with my last long play!” Together, they agreed on a strategy for
Out Cry
: to pursue Rip Torn and Geraldine Page in America, and Paul Scofield and Margaret Leighton in Britain. On both sides of the Atlantic, however, the actors proved hard to corral, and the play’s progress seemed to stall. It was then that the perfervid and proactive St. Just returned to the scene.

The friendship had been on the back burner during Williams’s Stoned Age in the late sixties. “I had stupidly feared you’d dismissed me from mind and heart,” Williams wrote to her, in March 1970, after receiving a letter she’d written while he was at Barnes. (It had gone undelivered because Wood had refused to give St. Just his hospital address.) Now the relationship was quickly rekindled. Whereas Wood sometimes seemed underinvolved and unavailable to Williams, St. Just was ardent and on call. Williams, who admitted to Wood that he had “little faith left in my own judgment” about
Out Cry
, also started to doubt Wood’s faith in him. “My agent Audrey Wood never sends me anything good about me,” he complained to Rex Reed. St. Just’s unalloyed enthusiasm for the work was in dramatic contrast to Wood’s measured admiration. “You have written a poem of extreme, staggering sensitivity and elegance and strength,” St. Just told Williams. Among his circle of intimates, St. Just also had the emotional advantage of being untainted by the plot, as Williams saw it, to have him committed. He had cut himself off completely from Dakin (who went so far as to protest outside Williams’s Key West house with a placard reading, “TENNESSEE WILLIAMS UNFAIR TO HIS BROTHER”). “I’ll never understand why my frantic male sibling, that intrepid actor and statesman, was permitted to put me into the sadistic hands of that threesome,” Williams wrote to Wood. The implicit reproach to Wood, whom Williams suspected had been “in on the conspiracy,” was clear.

By May 1970, Williams had become sufficiently agitated over the fate of
Out Cry
to face Wood with his fears. “I have a suspicion that you don’t really want it produced during my lifetime,” he wrote to her, “and don’t start thinking I am paranoiac because I entertain such a suspicion . . . since ordinarily by this time, a production would have been set up and scheduled in the foreseeable future, if for no other reason, at least for the psychological comfort of the author. So do please speak up on the subject, I simply don’t have any time left anymore for the long, cool, silent treatment.”

“Once she got the inkling that Tenn was beginning to get suspicious of someone, she would pee in their ear,” Rader said of St. Just’s habit of playing on Williams’s paranoia. “Obviously Audrey has a pair of wire clippers connected to the New York telephone exchange from her office to the Plaza,” St. Just wrote to her “dearly beloved Tenn.” “Because the second you said, ‘Well, now for Audrey,’ there was a crackling sound of burning flesh and a hissing sound. I got a short, sharp electric shock, and I imagine the operator is a small pile of ashes.” Part of their “
amitié amoureuse
,” as St. Just dubbed their friendship, was the delicious intimacy of collusion. In July 1970, in a playful poem, Williams appealed for Wood’s affection: “Remember me as one of your clients / not the greatest of these, not the least / but in some small way distinguished from all of the others”; by August, he was gleefully betraying it. “I knocked Audrey’s little hat off her head this p.m. by informing her that I wanted you to receive 15% of my royalties on this play (if any) and for that tricky lawyer of mine (Alan Schwartz) to get cracking on the ‘agreement,’ ” he swaggered to St. Just. “I feel that you have done far more to advance the production of this play than the Lady Mandarin.”

That summer, behind Wood’s back, Williams had begun to cut deals for himself. He wired a producer in August:

DO NOT BE CONCERNED IF YOU RECEIVED COMMUNICATION FROM MY AGENT SINCE I INTEND TO ACT QUITE INDEPENDENTLY WITH YOU ON OUR DEALS ON THE WEST COAST. HAVE LATELY DISCOVERED THAT REPRESENTATION SOMETIME OBSTRUCTION

While he complained to Wood that he felt like “a forsaken creature,” Williams was quite prepared to do the forsaking himself. In late September 1970, without telling Wood, he deputized St. Just to be his European agent. “It appears for all practical purposes, and some of an entirely spiritual nature, you are now representing me, not Audrey Wood. She will continue to collect her ten percent and I don’t begrudge it, but you are now my functioning representative and from now on whatever you place for me, for publication or production, I want you to receive fifteen percent.” (“Naturally, I never took the fifteen percent,” St. Just said. “I’m not an agent, nor have ever considered myself capable of being one.”) What St. Just was looking for wasn’t a promotion to agent but a pole position to Williams’s heart. For a while, she reigned as his saving angel, albeit of the five o’clock variety. Inevitably, the news put Wood into “one of her Old Testament furies,” according to Williams, who now surmised, “No support can be expected from that quarter.”

On December 29, 1969, William Liebling, Wood’s business partner and husband of thirty-one years, died; she was in mourning. Although Williams wrote her an eloquent condolence letter, her loss won her a new nickname in his cruel conspiracy with St. Just: “Somehow we must circumvent the machinations of the Widow Wood—never up to no good! . . . oh, I do wish you were here to deal with this situation!—as only you could,” Williams wrote to St. Just at the beginning of 1971. In July 1970, Williams had vowed “by hook or crook—any means, however devious” to see
Out Cry
mounted. He was now fully in devious mode. Despite Wood’s having written “for the 94th time” to clarify Scofield’s position on joining the British cast, Williams had St. Just working on the sly to chase the actor down, and he brazenly went behind Wood’s back to petition Schwartz to make overtures to the director John Hancock. “I would like
you
to act as ‘liaison’ between me and Hancock, not
Audrey
,” he wrote.

In his complaints to Schwartz about Wood’s dilatory responses, Williams made no reference to the fact that Wood was still grieving. “Audrey informed me on the phone a couple of days ago, in her most elegiac tone, that the scripts had arrived and that she would be reading one at some unspecified date and would let me know her opinion,” he wrote to Schwartz. “I said, ‘Please don’t.’ ” Williams continued:

For the past ten years—and the fault may be principally mine—my relations, professional and personal, with this extraordinary woman have undergone a steady deterioration and it has now come to a point where I feel quite convinced that if I am to retain my license to practice as a writer—and if I am not a practicing writer I feel that I am just about nothing—I must somehow by-pass “Miss Wood’s office.” . . . Although Audrey would probably never admit this even to herself, it is quite apparent to me that she does not want this last long play of mine to be done while I am living. . . . If you wish evidence to support this conviction of mine, I can provide you with it by the boat-load!

Williams could point to a few galling recent confusions in his dealings with Wood. Although, for instance, he had made two trips to New York to rescind Dakin’s power of attorney over his corporations—“He is an ethical idiot,” Williams said—he was shocked to discover that this hadn’t been done. “Why didn’t anyone tell me?” he wrote to Wood in late 1970, adding, “After all, I have not accumulated too much money for these years of terrific effort as a writer and it must be protected for my sister and me: neither of us is likely to succeed in a future career.” He also claimed to have almost signed a contract with ABC Television, which would have meant that after his death the network could cannibalize his oeuvre to make series about his characters. Because she was in on the deal, Williams claimed, Wood had not brought this fine point to his attention. After his death, he said, she was also planning to develop a Tennessee Williams theme park. “Tennessee was adamant in his belief that such were the evil designs Audrey had on his work, a conspiracy he had discovered and exposed in the nick of time,” Rader said. (There is no archival evidence to support Williams’s notions.)

One week after their blowup in Chicago, Williams wrote to Wood:

To quote a line now deleted from the script, “The punctuation marks in life include periods which includes one that is final.” It is not a good line in a play but it is a true statement. I feel we have both felt for nearly ten years that a long and mutually beneficial professional relationship was wearing itself thin and has now at last worn itself out. . . .

Of course there are many, many specifics that it would be only hurtful to go into regarding this break in our professional relations. I have been through quite enough of an upsetting nature to feel justified in sparing myself a further account of why the change must be made.

I hope you will be as willing as I am to remember only the many good things about our relationship and forget what is unpleasant and could only hurt us both.

I hope you will still regard me as a friend.

Over the next couple of months, Williams and Wood made stabs at civility; a few cordial letters were exchanged. Wood now worked for International Creative Management (ICM), one of the most powerful agencies in the entertainment industry; Bill Barnes, a new recruit to ICM, was suggested as a suitable replacement for Wood. He was handsome, Southern, and gay; formerly he had been an assistant to Otto Preminger. According to Rader, Milton Goldman, the head of ICM’s theater department, saw this as “a temporary holding action until things with Audrey could be patched up.”

Many months later, while Wood was having Sunday brunch at the Algonquin with the novelist Sidney Sheldon, she heard a voice say, “Hello, Audrey,” and saw a hand extended in her direction. Instinctively, Wood reached out to take it. She looked up; Williams was standing in front of her. “Then something happened over which I had no control. My hand involuntarily withdrew,” Wood said. Williams stalked away angrily; Wood excused herself from the table and stepped into the hotel lobby to calm herself with deep breaths and tranquilizers. The encounter brought into focus the depth of her wound. The friendship, which had sustained them both for more than three decades, was no longer possible. “There was no way she could take him back,” Arthur Kopit, another of Wood’s stable of star playwrights, who visited with Wood in her Westport cottage soon after she’d been fired, said. “Maybe if Liebling had still been alive she could have. She was a very proud woman, and he had done something terrible to her. She could not allow it to happen again.”

No playwright-agent relationship in American theater history had had a longer or more glorious story than Williams’s partnership with Wood. “She was way more than an agent to him, and she knew it,” Kopit said. “She had no children of her own. Her clients were her children, and Williams was No. 1 son.” Wood had been a kind of taproot, a connection to the idealism and the adventurousness of Williams’s literary journey. Without her keen critical eye, her deep knowledge of the theater, and her understanding of his complex personality, he was adrift, with no one to guide him. In the course of a year, the bulwarks of Williams’s emotional and professional support—Wood, Marion Vaccaro, Oliver Evans, and Dakin Williams—had either died or become dead to him, and Williams was left more alone than ever, making him easy prey to the mindless Key West brotherhood he gathered around himself. Of that “weird tribe,” David Lobdell, Williams’s poet pen pal who became his house sitter, wrote, “It has the makings of a good horror movie.” Like the characters in
Out Cry
, Williams was now lost in his own theater.

Although Williams had many explanations for his rash act, there was an irrational one that he couldn’t directly acknowledge. Wood, with her criticism and her austere presence—“There is much about her that reminds me of eighteenth-century women of note,” he said—was a reminder not only of the past but of what
he
had been and knew he could no longer be. She saw—or he thought she saw—that his writing was less powerful than it had been in their salad days. Wood’s devotion had been a kind of inspiration; now it was a kind of humiliation. In firing her, Williams was also releasing himself from any obligation to his past, including the obligation to be great. He projected the shame of his own behavior onto Wood. “She found it quite easy to manipulate me when I was too ill and drugged and disintegrated to resist manipulation,” he explained defensively in September 1971 to Floria Lasky, his new lawyer. “There has been an outrageous betrayal of trust and that is something which I cannot accept, especially since I gave the betrayer more confidence and license than would any other of her clients, for many years.”

To the upbeat Bill Barnes, whom he dubbed “the Dixie Buzz Bomb,” Williams wrote, “I feel that since we’ve met everything has gone for the best, you and I, because there is a wonderful balance between our psychic vibes.” Not all of Williams’s friends held Barnes in the same esteem. “He is a thoroughly dangerous and faggoty intriguer of the first order,” Chuck Bowden wrote in 1972 to St. Just, with whom he had joined forces to produce
Out Cry
in London. “He has Tenn completely mesmerized and under his thumbs, what with pot, whores, personal appearances, spies and his pretensions to being A SOUTHERN GENTLEMAN.”