Tennessee Williams: Women Who Influenced THE GLASS MENAGERIE

 

DECEMBER 1983 DOTSON RADER

The towering giants of the modern American theater are Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams, each of whom captured society's sense of loss and longing. Williams was certainly the theater’s major voice over the past fifty years. A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, notably, dealt with themes never before so boldly confronted on the American stage. With his death this year we lost one of our most distinctive literary figures.

Ifirst met Tennessee Williams shortly after he got out of the mental ward of what he called Barnacle Hospital, in St. Louis, where he had been confined by his brother, Dakin. Tennessee had flipped out on copious amounts of Doriden, Mellaril, Seconal, Ritalin, Demerol, amphetamine, and too much sorrow in Key West, and Dakin was called when his brother, in a drug-alcohol stupor, fell against a hot stove and badly burned himself. After having Tennessee baptized a Catholic at St. Mary, Star of the Sea Church in Key West—an event lost forever in one of the boozy black holes of his mind—Dakin hauled him to the nuthouse. Soon he was locked in an isolation cell in the violent ward for fighting with other inmates over what they would watch on the communal television set. He liked soaps, and the other loonies wanted to see game shows; a row ensued, and the orderlies dragged him off and shut him away in a padded cell, where he suffered two coronaries and nearly died. For all that and more he never forgave Dakin, and it inculcated in him a terror of going mad that never left him. Years later, near the end of his life, when Tennessee would do something particularly odd—dress in pajamas for a formal party or wander about Key West in a fright wig pretending to be his sister, Miss Rose—I would laugh and try as gently as possible to dissuade him, all the while knowing that when the peculiarity of his actions finally sunk in, he would take it as evidence that his pilot light was about to burn out and Barnacle Hospital lay ahead as the last stop on his trolley line. And days of convincing him once again that he was not going crazy, senile, that one cell too many had not been burned out by booze—all that would follow endlessly.

“I’m happy I never had any children,” he told me before he died. “There have been too many instances of extreme eccentricity and even lunacy in my family on all four sides for me to want to have children. I think it’s fortunate I never did. Miss Edwina [his mother] went crazy. She thought there was a horse living in her room and when she didn’t want to do something, she’d say, ‘I can’t, Tom. I have to go riding today!’”

The night I met him, I had gone to the opening of an underground movie in Greenwich Village, a porno flick passing as a work of art. The theater was jammed with famous people, writers and painters mainly, which surprised me because I didn’t realize then what I know now: common to the people who create our art is a passion for pornography. To the degree that if you bombed five or six skin houses in Manhattan on any given afternoon, you’d probably wipe out half the literary establishment in America. I do not know why that is, nor why so many of our greatest artists—painters, writers, poets, composers—are either gay or Jewish or both. But there you are.

After the movie I went to a party in SoHo, a district of New York that wasn’t fashionable then. The party was held in a filthy loft with dim lights, mattresses on the floor, Day-Glo posters, cheap wine, dope, and naked bodies. Among those present were the Warhol gang and Jim Morrison of the Doors, who was given to sexually displaying himself at parties. Also there was the usual assortment of druggies, fetishists, whores, and other popular figures of the day. I suppose in looking back it seems curious that the greatest playwright of our age would be present, but we were in the lees of the Sixties, when you discovered the most famous people in the most improbable places, at Maoist rallies, for example, or in the sex rooms of the Anvil. And Tennessee, who thought himself a radical, a revolutionary, had been physically incapacitated during much of the decade and so had an intense, if belated, curiosity about the social, sexual, and political movements of the period, especially as they touched the young. He liked to slum, in part because he identified with the outcast, the loser, those up against it. And also, in being places where respectable people thought it was unsuitable to be seen, he made a kind of cockeyed solidarity with those who shared with him a hatred of the rich.

“The Sixties were a decade of great vitality,” he remembered more than a decade later. “The civil rights movement, the movement against war and imperialism. When I said to Gore Vidal, ‘I slept through the Sixties,’ I was making a bad joke. I was intensely aware of what was going on. Even in the violent ward I read the newspapers avidly. Then we had brave young people fighting against privilege and injustice. Now we have the de la Rentas. They are the Madame du Barrys of our time! I find them an outrageous symptom of our society, the shallowness and superficiality, the lack and fear of any depth that characterizes this age, this decade. It appalls me.”

At the party, Candy Darling, a drag queen and Warhol superstar who would later star in Tennessee’s Small Craft Warnings, came up to me and said in her breathless way, “Tennessee Williams is here, and he wants to meet you!”

I said, “I thought he was dead.” I thought that because he had disappeared from public view. In the Sixties people were dropping like flies right and left, and if you didn’t hear about somebody for a time you assumed he had succumbed.

Candy Darling brought me over to meet him. I was dressed in a black leather jacket, leather boots, a black cowboy hat, which was the costume I affected then. Tennessee was wearing a gray suit, a multicolored silk scarf, and the most hideous tie I had ever seen—a sort of fluorescent rainbow of clashing colors that Eighth Avenue pimps adore. I was amazed by how tiny he was. (When his body was taken out of the Hotel Elysée in the black plastic bag and lifted into the morgue wagon, I was again reminded in the most terrible way of how little a man he was: so much brilliance came from so small a flame.)

Although he had read one of my books and some of my magazine stuff, he pretended to take me for a hustler. It was the only pass he ever made at me, and in years to come I would realize that if I had consented it would not have worked, because his sexual taste was so specific and so completely delimited by his memory of the body of Frank Merlo that any sexual engagement between us would have been unhappy. For it was through sex that he sought to bridge the distance between himself and his late lover. It was Merlo’s death that had shattered him and in the years that remained he tried to overcome the loss, but he never did.

“Frankie [Merlo] was so close to life!” he once told me. “I was never that close, you know. He gave me the connection to day-to-day and night-to-night living. To reality. He tied me down to earth, baby. And I had that for fourteen years, until he died. And that was the happiest period of my adult life.”

So the night I met him, Tennessee grinned at me and asked, “How much do you get a night?”

“Two hundred bucks,” I replied, playing along.

He paused, rolling his eyes at Candy. “Well, baby, what do you charge to escort an older gentleman to dinner?”

“A hundred bucks.”

He feigned shock, felt in his pockets for money, pulled out a few bills. After making a great show of counting his cash, he looked up and asked, “Do you suppose we could settle for lunch?”

He was fifty-nine, and I was twenty-six, but to me we both seemed so much older than we were.

The following day I met him for lunch at the Plaza Hotel, where he was staying, and I ended up spending three days with him in his suite until he left for Chicago. Quickly I became used to his routine. He would arise early and make himself a martini, order a pot of coffee, and with a bottle of wine in hand toddle into the living room and sit at his portable typewriter, where he would work until noon. Then we’d lunch and go for a swim. He would swim at the Y, although he had guest privileges at the New York Athletic Club. But he wouldn’t go there anymore because the members would make antigay remarks about him and it reminded him too painfully of his father, the shoe salesman, who would cruelly call him “Nancy” in front of his friends. “They’re all the same, baby. Shoe salesmen with a bad territory and wives they can’t abide. So they take it out on us.” But that habit of writing every day and swimming he maintained until he died. It’s what kept him alive as long as it could.

And, too, I became used to his falling down, his drug haze, his drinking; hysterical laughter, rage and remorse, the web of self-destructive habits that would undo him. But in some unknown way the spirit that gave the world Blanche DuBois and Stanley, Chance Wayne and Alexandre del Lago, Big Daddy, Amanda Wingfield, Sebastian and Mrs. Venable, One Arm, and more was, by their very creation, so depleted of defense, rendered so exceptionally vulnerable, that it required the “ministrations,” as he would say, of drugs and booze to make it through the night. When I met him what I was witness to was the beginning of his irreversible decline, when he could no longer keep his torment under control.

Tennessee told me that artists—by that he meant writers, for he never referred to them by any other term—spend their lives dancing on a high wire without any protective net beneath them, and when they fall it is sudden and final. Only Tennessee’s end wasn’t sudden. It was protracted and painful, lasting more than a decade during which he saw himself held up to public contempt. One of the few times I saw him cry was when he read a review by John Simon entitled “The Sweet Bird of Senility.” Finally, he came to dread every new production, feared the public, and, except for Claudia Cassidy and Clive Barnes, hated the critics. When I first knew him he delighted in being recognized in public. By the end of his life, it mortified him, because he felt like currency debased, like an old ham who had become a caricature of himself.

To again state the obvious: he was our greatest playwright. Only he didn’t know it. He was convinced that he was a failure, that his work and life were beyond repair and his plays would not live.

He had begun as a poet, starved as a poet, and because of the very resistance of the world to his poetry, it came to occupy a place of such inordinate importance in purity in his mind that he finally believed that history’s judgment on him would rest on his verse. His life as a poet was associated with his early years—the lack of recognition, the poverty and hopelessness of a young poet in this country. His success as a playwright was almost inadvertent, and when it came to him late—he was thirty-five—it was so sudden and massive, so out of proportion to what he had come to expect, that he could never believe it would last.

He suspected that his career was a fluke, a series of gimmicks, and sooner or later he’d be found out.

From that came his paranoia. “If I didn’t have my demons, I wouldn’t have my angels.”

His demons won the day.

But I didn’t know that about him in the days we were first together. All I knew was that I, like every other writer who came after him, was irrevocably affected by his work. You couldn’t get away from him because he had changed the way writing was done. With The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Rose Tattoo, Sweet Bird of Youth, Orpheus Descending, Summer and Smoke, and other plays, he married poetry to naturalism and opened drama to subject matter never before touched upon in our theater. Incest, homosexuality, cannibalism, impotency, drug addiction, cancer, madness, sexual frenzy, ineffable loss and longing, all redeemed and beatified by poetic gifts for dialogue and scene construction unmatched by any other writer. He ended the puritan sensibility in American theater and liberated it, poetically and thematically, from the moralism and falseness and middlebrow smugness that had held it bound. In so doing, he helped free us all and ushered in an age when, among other things, the opening of a pornographic movie could be a social event. In sum, Tennessee Williams forever changed America’s knowledge of herself, opening up to light the darkest corners of her psyche, and thereby forced her to accept truth she did not wish to confront.

Two years ago, on his seventieth birthday, I went to Chicago to be with him for the opening of his last play, A House Not Meant to Stand. In a way, being there, he had returned to his beginnings, for it was in Chicago that The Glass Menagerie gave him his first success. He was staying in a four-bedroom duplex apartment on top of the Radisson hotel, in an oppressive Twenties-style place that delighted him. He dubbed it the Norma Desmond Suite. He was in high spirits, deeply tanned, and optimistic about the play.

On the morning of his birthday he opened a few gifts and cards and we had champagne. By then, his friendships with the famous who had made their careers on his work—Brando, Taylor, Kazan, Beatty, and others—had fallen away. He felt it.

After swimming that afternoon, we sat drinking in his makeshift study and talking about writing. That, finally, was his life.

I asked him if he had any regrets.

“Oh, God, yes. But I can’t think about them now.”

He smiled and shook his head. He reached for his wine glass, his hand making an extraordinarily elegant arc as it reached the cold surface; his fingers, one by one, slowly touching it and then lifting it. It was a gesture unique to him, and it brought back such memories to my mind—good times, laughter, pranks, outrageous camping. And the kindliness of his nature.

All of those who met him when they were young and came to know him well will tell you what I do: that they never knew anyone kinder.

He was the net under the wire for us.

“All my life,” Tennessee said, “I’ve cared about the sufferings of people. There are few acts of volition. I don’t believe in individual guilt. I don’t think people are responsible for what they do. And yet, knowing that, I believe the moral person must try to avoid evil and cruelty and dishonesty as best he can. That remains to us.”

His greatness is that he tried to do that harder and longer than any other artist.

When he died, he was working, naturally, on a new play. He titled it In Masks Outrageous and Austere, from a poem by Elinor Wylie. I do not know if he ever finished it, but he talked a lot about it, and I read scenes from it. Or rather I would start to read a scene, and he would grab it from me impatiently and say, “Baby, you don’t know how to read!” Then he would sit back, reach for his wine, and, in his deep voice with its Mississippi drawl, read what he had written, cackling with laughter at the most sorrowful passages.

I can hear him reading now as I can hear him padding about the house in the middle of the night and knocking at my door before dawn and asking me to sit awhile with him because he cannot sleep, he is frightened, and will I stay with him until it is light? I can feel myself holding him, listening to him breathe after he’s taken yet another Seconal to sleep, listening to make sure the breaths are deep enough and long enough to signal that sleep has come and I can creep away knowing he is safe. He said many times that “death doesn’t like crowds. It comes to you when you’re alone.”

He was right.

In masks outrageous and austere
The years go by in single file;
But none has merited my fear,
And none has quite escaped my smile.

© 1983 Esquire Magazine