Memoirs

by Tennessee Williams

  In the course of this thing I will deal with some of the humorous events in my long friendship with Marion Vaccaro; at one point though she was perhaps my most devoted friend and also the definition of a Southern lady. Her family came from Georgia. She was the daughter of an Episcopalian minister, Reverend George Black, who, I understand, was somewhat given to drink, and they had a rather itinerant life on that account. His stay in one parish was somewhat limited, let us say; they moved from parish to parish. Well, everyone knows how little money ministers earn. My grandfather Dakin, who was an Episcopal minister, earned a salary of one hundred dollars a month. Marion’s father probably earned about the same, so she grew up under straitened circumstances. She received a scholarship to Smith College; she was a well-educated woman with fine taste in literature. Moreover, she was a very talented poet.

  But she was so humble about her poetry that she made no provisions for its publication. George, her brother, who survives in Coconut Grove, had promised to send me her poetry and I was going to see that it was published; but he didn’t until just this year, when he sent me a small portion of her earlier work. Previously he gave me a wonderful portrait of Marion, which hangs in my bedroom in Key West, and which shows how she looked when I first met her in 1941. Very lovely, with a piquant face. She was not a classic beauty but she had great charm and animation. In 1941 her mother was running a very genteel boardinghouse in one of the great mansions of Key West, a place called the Tradewinds. I met the Blacks and Marion in January of that year when I went to Key West for the first time, after the disaster of Battle of Angels in Boston. I chose Key West, in fact, because swimming was practically a way of life with me, and since Key West was the southernmost point in America, I figured I would be able to swim there while I was rewriting Battle. Well, I had a very good friend, Jim Parrott, the kid who was with me on the squab ranch in Laguna and who in 1941 was living in Miami. He was a lovely guy, not a homosexual. I might say that it would be incorrect if, whenever I mention a man, the inference be drawn that he is a homosexual. I assure you that I have known and liked many men who weren’t. Anyway, I saw Jim in Miami first and he drove me down to Key West, and we pulled up at this very, very handsome frame house—it was made of solid mahogany—and it had verandahs on all four sides, downstairs and upstairs, and it had what I think they called a captain’s walk on the roof. A fabulously beautiful building. Unfortunately it fell victim to an arsonist after the Blacks gave it up. But in 1941, Mrs. Black received us there very cordially, and when I mentioned that I was the grandson of a minister, she decided that naturally I was a gentleman, a rather sudden and premature conclusion. She took me in. She took Jim and me in first and gave us a bedroom downstairs. Then the following morning Jim had to go back to Miami—he was working there—and I was very reluctant to leave this beautiful house and Mrs. Cora Black, who had so much charm. She saw how I felt, and she said, “Tom, there’s a little shack in back of here. I don’t know what you’ll make of it, but it’s big enough for you.” She showed it to me and I said, “This is ideal, Mrs. Black, I don’t like living in large places,” which is true. So she fixed it up very charmingly for me. She installed a shower, and she charged me only seven dollars and fifty cents a week rent and it was there that I rewrote Battle. I used to ride a rented bike down to a Cuban restaurant and wake up on very strong black Cuban coffee, which was certainly not what the doctor would have prescribed for a man with a heart condition. Then I would ride the bike back to my cabin and I would knock out page after page of all kinds of things—not just Battle, but poetry and short stories. This Cuban coffee really was dynamite. It wasn’t doing my heart any good but I have a funny heart. Sometimes it seems to thrive on punishment.

  In those days in Key West there was a wonderful colony of artists. There was Arnold Blanch, and there was his lady friend, Doris Lee. Then there was the wife of the Japanese artist Kuniyoshi. And Grant Wood, the man who painted American Gothic, was there. It was the last year of his life. He was a rather dumpy little man with a white shock of hair and very, very friendly. Quite flushed in the face all the time, and not from embarrassment either. Well, we all used to forgather in the evenings at Hemingway’s old resort called Sloppy Joe’s. Hemingway had already left but his ex-wife, Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway, was still here, living in that lovely old Spanish colonial house on Whitehead Street. And they had a dance band at Sloppy Joe’s, a really good black dance band that played wonderful dance music. Key West had in those days a very authentic frontier atmosphere which was delightful. Even the weather seemed better. Sloppy Joe’s was far more colorful than it is today. It had a long front-to-rear bar; now it has a horseshoe-shaped bar. Hemingway’s old cronies were still hanging out there in 1941, and Marion and I used to go there in the evenings and dance.

  Now Marion had a husband who was the worst alcoholic I have ever known in my life. He was a likable guy, but he was giving Marion and Mrs. Black quite a good deal of trouble. When he wasn’t on alcohol, he was on ether. He had to be on one or the other, either alcohol or ether, that was how bad he drank, and he took a liking to me and he was continually coming back into my cabin while I was trying to work. And I have a horror of the smell of ether. As a child, I had my adenoids and tonsils removed and was circumcised at the same time under ether, and I received anesthesia shock, which has lasted ever since.

  This man would come in there exhaling these fumes of ether and glaring at me with his glass eye. I must have been much better natured in those days because I never threw him out. Of course, I probably couldn’t have thrown him out as he was physically powerful. Well, he was part of the local color at the time, but he was giving Marion a really hard time which she bore with great fortitude. He was one of the principal heirs of the Standard Fruit Company fortune. Marion must have married him in her middle or late twenties. I think she was rather late in marrying because she had had to earn her own living after she graduated from Smith and she was employed by Flo Ziegfeld as a tutor for his children. She worked with those children for quite a long while; Marion was very loyal in her friendships and up until the very end she was a close friend of Mr. Ziegfeld’s widow, Billie Burke.

  Occasionally during that winter, Jim Parrott would visit me for a weekend at the Blacks’. Once his visit coincided with a domestic crisis at the Tradewinds. Jim and I had been invited to dinner and during the course of it, for no apparent reason, Mr. Vaccaro removed his glass eye and hurled it at his mother-in-law. It landed in her soup bowl. Only a truly great lady could have handled this incident with such composure. Miss Clara, without a change of expression or intonation, simply fished the glass eye out of her soup, passed it to Marion on her soupspoon with the casual remark, “Sister, I think Regis has lost this.”

  Later on that evening he ran afoul of some gangsters who ran a gambling joint in the town. They threatened his life. It was decided that he must be removed immediately from the Keys. The only vehicle that was available for this purpose was Jim Parrott’s old Ford jalopy.

  The fugitive party consisted of Miss Clara, Marion, Jim, and myself, with Regis under a blanket, unconscious on the floor of the back seat.

  The Ford had developed a leak in the radiator. At frequent intervals we would have to stop and fill the steaming thing with sea-water that we scooped up along the way.

  Later I was to renew my friendship with Marion in New Orleans in 1946. She was a great enthusiast for all kinds of betting, and I often accompanied her and her mother to the New Orleans race-track. In New Orleans they lived in a lovely apartment of the Pontalba buildings alongside Jackson Square. When the touring company of Menagerie came to town, Marion and Miss Clara threw a lavish party for them, whole turkeys and hams, unlimited liquor, the whole bit.

  A few years later Marion and Miss Clara purchased a charming home in Coconut Grove. (Regis had now passed away.) Marion and Miss Clara had a keen interest in real estate and an instinct for it. At this time I entertained the notion of bringing Miss Rose and an attendant nurse to Florida
. Marion thought this a good idea, too, and she found a residence, bay-side in the Grove, with that project in mind. It was furnished nicely when I bought it and it was a real bargain at forty thousand dollars. The house itself was not too attractive. It was stucco, U-shaped, Spanish mission style, with a steeple containing a mission-bell on the roof. The grounds, however, were enchanting. They faced the bay and they were regally populated by very tall royal palm trees.

  I regret to say that the idea of establishing my sister in Florida had to be abandoned and so I rented out the property. I rented it to a man who worked for the magazine Life. Not long after he and his family took residence in it, the bay was struck by a hurricane and all the furnishings were scattered far and wide, but the house remained and, remarkably, so did the royal palms.

  In the years since then property on this location has greatly increased in value. The latest offer for the house and ground is $150,000, but I have turned it down, expecting that its value will further increase.

  I am lucky at real estate, lucky at cards: also sometimes at love.

  Then why should I regard myself as a wasted dude? Possibly because my adventures in theatre have failed more often than not.

  Before Castro took over Cuba, Marion and I used to have riotous weekends in Havana. Marion just as much enjoyed the frolicsome night life of Havana as I did and we would go to the same places to enjoy it. We even went back after Castro came in. The first time I went back to Havana after Castro’s triumph, I was introduced to him by Ernest Hemingway, whom I met through the British theatre critic Kenneth Tynan. Tynan called me—I was staying at the Hotel Nacional in Havana—and he said, “Would you like to meet Ernest Hemingway?” and I said, “I don’t think that’s advisable, do you? I understand that he can be very unpleasant to people of my particular temperament.” And Tynan said, “Well, I will be there to lend you what support I can. I think you ought to meet him because he is one of the great writers of your time and mine.” I said, “Okay, I’ll take a chance on it.” So we went down to the Floradita, which was Hemingway’s nighttime and daytime hangout, when he wasn’t at sea, and he couldn’t have been more charming. He was exactly the opposite of what I’d expected. I had expected a very manly, super-macho sort of guy, very bullying and coarse spoken. On the contrary, Hemingway struck me as a gentleman who seemed to have a very touchingly shy quality about him.

  Tynan has reported this first encounter humorously but not accurately. I was naturally awkward and I said some gauche things, for instance I mentioned to him that I was so distressed that his ex-wife, Pauline, had recently died, and then I inquired, “What did she die of?” Hemingway didn’t seem to take it amiss, but he said (sort of a struggle), “Well, she died and she’s dead,” and went on drinking. We started talking about bullfighting. I was not an aficionado of bullfighting, not somebody who knew the fine technique, the fine points of bullfighting, but one who enjoyed the spectacle of it and I had become, the previous summer, a good friend of Antonio Ordóñez, who was, you might almost say, an idol of Ernest Hemingway’s. I mentioned to Hemingway that I knew Antonio Ordóñez. Hemingway was pleased, I thought, and he was also pleased that I shared his interest in bullfighting.

  Hemingway said, “You know that this revolution in Cuba is a good revolution.” Well, I knew that it was a good revolution, because I had been to Cuba when Batista was in power and he had the charming habit of torturing young students. He would make them sit in chairs that were electric—or that had electric attachments that would burn them horribly. He would sometimes emasculate them. He was a horrifying sadist. The United States, in my opinion, made a drastic error. If only they had appreciated the possibility of a détente. Castro was, after all, a gentleman, and well educated. It would have been quite possible for Cuba to have been drawn amiably into our orbit where Cuba naturally belongs, but our State Department chose instead to try to oust Mr. Castro. Consequently, we made an enemy of Cuba and Cuba turned toward Russia for support. This had not yet happened when I met Hemingway.

  Anyhow, Hemingway wrote me a letter of introduction to Castro. Kenneth Tynan and I went to the palace. Castro was having a cabinet session at the time. His cabinet session lasted quite long. We waited it out, sitting on the steps outside the room in which the session was being held. After about a three-hour wait, the door was thrown open and we were ushered in. Castro greeted us both very warmly. When Kenneth Tynan introduced me, the Generalissimo said, “Oh, that cat,” meaning Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which surprised me—delighted me, of course. I couldn’t imagine the generalissimo knowing anything about a play of mine. Then he proceeded to introduce us to all of his cabinet ministers. We were given coffee and liqueurs and it was a lovely occasion, well worth the three-hour wait.

  Now, back to Marion. I loved her very deeply, though perhaps not as generously as she did me. Some of my very closest friends have been women and she was one. Marion was lovely and she drank quite excessively. We traveled a lot together.

  Once when she and I were at the Hotel Nacional, we were playing gin rummy in our cabana by the pool one afternoon and we saw Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir sitting in another cabana and I said, “Marion, I think we ought to meet them.” She didn’t object so I went to introduce myself to Mr. Sartre. He was quite pleasant and I said, “Won’t you come and have a drink with us, sir.” He and Miss de Beauvoir came over and joined us. Miss de Beauvoir was rather an icy lady, but Jean-Paul Sartre was very warm and charming. We had quite a long conversation; I mentioned that Marion wrote poetry. She had showed me some particularly lovely poems the evening before. He said, “Oh, I would love to see them!” I said, “Marion, do you mind if I let Mr. Sartre see your poetry?” She said, “Oh, Tom, please don’t. I just scribble. I just amuse myself at night, scribbling these things.” I said, “Yes, but, Marion, they are lovely poems in my opinion.” Mr. Sartre said, “Oh, just go up and get them.” So I just went up and fetched them down. Well, Sartre was very, very impressed. I must say that Miss de Beauvoir continued to be icy. I think that’s just her demeanor. At one point in Paris, I had expected Sartre to come to a party of mine, but he hadn’t, and that’s why it surprised me so that he was cordial on this later occasion.

  So back to the spring of 1941, when I was first in Key West. With spring came a lovely five-hundred-dollar bonus from my friends the Rockefellers. On it I returned with my rewritten Battle to Manhattan, submitted it to the Guild, and after some weeks of reflection Mr. Langner phoned me. (I mean he answered when I phoned him.)

  “About this rewrite, Tennessee. You have gone like the Leaping Frog of Calaveras County, you know, that Mark Twain story, I mean you rewrote it too much like the frog jumped out of the county.”

  And that was that.

  After he’d hung up, I thought ruefully of my first meeting with Mr. Langner, whom I still like and remember fondly. He had a desk the size of a President’s and it had been covered that day with more playscripts than I had imagined to exist in the world. In one great gesture, he swept the desk clean of all scripts but mine and said, “I have no interest in anything but genius, so please sit down.”

  (Since that day, when people have spoken to me of “genius,” I have felt an inside pocket to make sure my wallet’s still there.)

  Running elevators in Manhattan: My most colorful term of employment of this type was on the night shift at the old San Jacinto Hotel, a building now demolished, on Madison Avenue in the Fifties. This hotel was really a sort of retirement home for dowagers of high degree but diminished fortune who would spend their last dime on a good address. Not all of these dowagers got along well together. In fact there were two of them, an old girl who bore the stately name of Auchincloss and went into a manic seizure whenever she inadvertently found herself in the elevator with another old girl who bore an equally prestigious surname.

  There was a young poet on the night shift with me. He was the phone operator and he had warned me that I must never, not even if the San Jacinto caught fire, permit these two d
owagers to occupy the elevator at the same time.

  Well, it happened: they did. And the scene in that elevator was like the climax of a cockfight. And (wouldn’t you know) the elevator stuck between floors! I tried to get it back up to the Auchincloss floor, and the other dowager shrieked, “Not back up, down, down!” I swung the crank and the elevator stalled between floors nine and ten and the disturbance must have wakened everyone in the building that midnight. (I am now convinced that old ladies are immune to strokes, despite many reports to the contrary.)

  I remember that the hotel also contained a marvelous old character actress named Cora Witherspoon. I believe it is safe for me to say that this delightful lady, now gone from us, was addicted to morphine and that the poet and I had to fill her prescriptions for her at an all-night pharmacy.

  Morphine is supposed to be a “downer” but it always gave Miss Witherspoon a “high.”

  She used to rap with the poet and me till nearly daybreak in the San Jacinto lobby. Her “fix” would never wear itself out till the first cock’s crow. Then the poet and I would sort of lift her into the lift, the poet would open her bedroom door and I would get her to the edge of her bed and let her drop on it.

  “What will I do without you boys?” she’d murmur, with that sweet, sad wisdom of the old who know that “all will pass.”

  (Has anyone ever understood the irresistible gallantry and charm of old ladies, in and out of the theatre, so well as Giraudoux in The Madwoman of Chaillot? Kate Hepburn was just not quite old or mad enough to suggest the charisma of their lunacy.)

  Toward the end of 1941 I was companion to an abstract painter in the warehouse district of the West Village. This friend was, nervously speaking, a basket case: I mean he was a real freak-out before it was fashionable to be one.

  During that period I was very briefly employed at a bistro called The Beggar’s Bar, owned by a fantastic refugee from Nazi Germany named Valesca Gert.