Memoirs

by Tennessee Williams

  Nevertheless, it was purchased for the screen. The negotiations, which were very involved, took place in England. The lively little fingers of Lester Persky were hotly engaged in the project. The part of Chris was offered to Sean Connery, who could have played it well but turned it down with grace. Then Joseph Losey was engaged as director, an excellent choice. Losey is a master. Then a dreadful mistake was made. Persky offered the film to the Burtons. And he told me that if I invested thirty G’s, he could deliver them and that they would make me a million. That was not how it worked out, exactly. The film (called BOOM) was shot on Sardinia. The direction, the script and the sets were stunning, but Dick was too old for Chris and Liz was too young for Goforth.

  Another detriment to the film’s reception was that it was an unmistakable attack on imperialism, represented by the American Goforth, whose personal emblem was a golden griffin, who was guilty of murder for which she went scot-free because she had “droit de domaine” over the island and all its inhabitants.

  Despite its miscasting, I feel that BOOM was an artistic success and that eventually it will be received with acclaim.

  History moves toward the fall of Babylon, again and again, as irresistibly as a mountain torrent rushes to the sea.

  I began this account of Milk Train’s fourth production, the one with Tallulah (the first was at Spoleto and the third was at Virginia’s Barter Theatre), with the somewhat extravagant statement that a play which contained such a strong female part as that of Flora Goforth is likely to “surface repeatedly.” On reflection, I’m afraid this claim has yet to be justified. A production of Milk Train was undertaken at London’s Royal Court Theatre (one of my favorite English-speaking theatres in the world) under what appeared to be propitious circumstances. Ruth Gordon in the role of Goforth, Donald Madden as Christopher Flanders. But the production went up in smoke while in the first week of rehearsals. Not being present, I can’t tell you precisely all that went wrong but I have heard it reported from a cast-member that the brilliant Miss Gordon was not happy with the brilliant Mr. Madden, and vice versa. I have heard that, when Mr. Madden delivered a line, Miss Gordon would interrupt the rehearsals to inquire of him, “Is that how you’re going to say it?” And that this was naturally quite disconcerting to Donald’s Irish nature.

  The whole thing was apparently more than disconcerting to the director, dear George Devine, for the production was indefinitely suspended when he suffered a coronary.

  I hope I am not implying that there is something spooky or ill-starred about the play itself. But it has not escaped my attention that aside from a San Francisco revival, under the inspired direction of John Hancock—the only director who has ever suggested to me transpositions of material that were artistically effective—Milk Train appears to be on a side track, shunted there, I’m afraid, by the excessively beauteous Goforth of Liz Taylor in BOOM. However, I stick by this much of my original assertion: it remains a marvelous vehicle for an equally marvelous female star, and I don’t mean the planet Venus. Miss Hermione Baddeley is very much around to support that contention of the playwright.

  Who could play Goforth now? Perhaps Miss Baddeley would take another shot at it. Perhaps Angela Lansbury and perhaps Sylvia Miles.

  Meanwhile Bacchus is both willing and patient.

  (Let us reflect a few moments about plays that are deeply concerned with human mortality. I am afraid that the audience is afraid. I believe that John Hancock in San Francisco even scared the playwright when, at his production of Milk Train, he had skeletal figures of white plaster seated here and there in his theatre [what a brilliantly bizarre invention!], and when he invited the playwright to get up on the stage and read Goforth aloud to the cast, which he did to their enthusiastic applause.)

  The nicest thing about this short stay in San Juan has been my reunion with José Quintero. He and his friend Nicky the Greek have rented and furnished a charming residence here. It was intended to be a guesthouse but the only permanent transient thus far on the premises is a charming young dog who was taken in from the street after it suffered a slight but nervously traumatic collision with a passing car. I have known José a long time, ever since he resurrected Summer and Smoke, with the witchery of his staging and the witchery of Geraldine Page. Later we were both tenants of a high-rise next door to the Dakota on West Seventy-second and we had hilarious poker nights at least once a week.

  Last night we played poker again, here in San Juan, and he presented me with the first copy (in bound proofs) of his forthcoming memoirs. The book is titled If You Don’t Dance They Beat You. It is an enchanting book and the pertinence of the title has emboldened me to consider changing the current (unpublished) title of my own memoirs.

  It is difficult to write about a period of profound, virtually clinical depression, because when you are in that state, everything is observed through a dark glass which not only shadows but distorts all that is seen. It’s also hazardous to write about it, since the germ of it still lingers in your system and it could be activated again by thinking back on it.

  This is a chance that I’ll have to take this morning, despite the fact that I am already depressed by the situation of my oldest and closest friend, Professor Oliver Evans, who has returned to his native city, New Orleans, as a patient at Ochsner Clinic, after symptoms of recurring illness. (A few years ago he had a brain cancer removed: afterward, cobalt therapy. In a few months he appeared to have made a truly remarkable recovery: he resumed a full-time teaching schedule in the English Department of a university in California: there was an impressive renascence of his writing career: everything boded well until the last few months when he started to suffer from attacks of vertigo without warning, resulting in falls which fractured his sacroiliac, and various other serious injuries. Now he is immobilized and in terror that a close relative’s husband, whom he regards as hostile, will have him committed to a public asylum.)

  Almost immediately after Frank’s death, I flew down to Key West, where I had dispatched the poet Angel months before. But Angel was unable to help me now and it is hard to think of a single person who could. Probably I should have been hospitalized for a few months, willingly or not. It is strange how alone you are at times of great personal crisis. Strange is too convenient a term, and too euphemistic. The hard and cold fact of the matter is that nearly everyone who knows you draws back from you as if you bore some terrible contagion. At least, that’s how it seems to you.

  Going to pieces in “the sixties,” my stoned age, suggests to me a slow-motion photo of a building being demolished by dynamite: it occurred in protracted stages, but the protraction gave it no comfort.

  In Key West I resumed my relations with Angel. But even angels are subject to the weaknesses and defections of humanity which invented their existence.

  Angel had defected emotionally (and understandably) to a young man, formerly a commercial air-pilot and then, at that time, a pill-freak with suicidal impulses but with a great deal of charm and a very attractive appearance.

  If there was a suicidal impulse connected with my own combo of pills and liquor, an impulse distinct from increasing alienation, it was almost entirely on the unconscious level. That’s a silly remark, I know. I am certainly not at all eloquent upon the difficult subject of my collapse in the sixties. I can’t give you a detailed account of it without boring the pants off us both. I’ll only attempt to record some of the most memorable symptoms and occasions, such as—

  One day the Key West garden club ladies came en masse for a tour of my house and little compound on Duncan Street.

  Bradley and Shirley Ayres, the widow of Lemuel Ayres, took me out to South Beach and Leoncia and Angel received the garden club ladies.

  I couldn’t bear the beach that day. I took a Seconal and went home while the house and grounds were still crowded with the curious ladies.

  I entered and started to shout to them, “Out, out, out, out, out!”

  They flew in all directions like hens in a thundersto
rm: I took another pill and went to bed …

  (The occasion is still a legend in Key West.)

  Late that spring I dismissed Angel. I remember his saying to me, with tears in his eyes, “I thought I’d found a home.”

  You see, Angel was really a dear boy: and I a ravaged man.

  I suppose it marked the beginning of my social downfall on that southernmost island. It would be “sour grapes” to say that I had never cared much about conventional Key West society. I had the Quixotic notion that I could continue to enjoy all kinds of society, the bohemian and the elite, the straight and the gay. I know many persons in “the gay world” who accomplish this trick with apparent ease: however, I think it still requires a good deal of hypocrisy, even now that society in the Western world is presumed to have discarded its prejudices. My feeling is that the prejudices have simply gone underground.

  In any case I was too bizarre in my behavior, during this decade, for even the conservative members of the gay world.

  (Please don’t misunderstand me—unless I misunderstand myself.)

  The direction of my life was away from both social and sexual contacts, not by conscious choice but through the deeper and deeper retreat into the broken world of my self.

  I arrived at the nadir of this long period of depression when I began living totally alone. I forget the year and the season of the year but instinct drew me back to New Orleans and I made a last solitary effort to pull myself together. By this time, I could still make such an effort but it was always doomed to collapse. I believe a depression is classified as “clinical” when the victim stops moving, stops eating and bathing. I never descended to quite that point, but despite my efforts to go on, I think I was aware of death’s attraction. The most painful aspect of the depression was always an inability to talk to people. As long as you can communicate with someone who is inclined to sympathy, you retain a chance to be rescued.

  By the time I arrived in New Orleans I was almost reduced to mutism. And yet something was frantically, almost hopelessly, attempting to find a solution.

  Through some friend, I discovered an ideal place to make this last-ditch attempt. He or she, I’m not sure who it was, arranged for me to take out a six-month lease on a lovely little pink house with white shutters on Dauphine Street in “the Quarter.” It had been beautifully renovated and furnished by the late Clay Shaw and it was part of a group of little houses that faced Dauphine and St. Louis streets, forming an “L” about a lovely patio which contained a swimming pool, and each had its own little garden. The weather was bright and mild, an amiable black girl came in daily for house-cleaning: but in spite of all these favorable conditions, I turned the house into something as psychologically tenable as Kafka’s “Burrow.”

  Each morning I attempted to write, but it was as difficult as trying to talk.

  After two or three weeks some last remaining contact in New Orleans managed to persuade me to give a party, and this was the most calamitous and ludicrous event, I should think, that’s ever been called a party.

  It was a “catered affair” and almost everyone I’d ever known in the city was invited to it. I was only able to greet them and few of them by name. I sat in a corner and regarded them all with a look of frozen withdrawal.

  You see how difficult it is to write about a depression of this depth?

  Someone had recommended a psychiatrist to me. I went to him daily but almost as soon as I entered his office, I would cry out, “I’m too sick to talk, I feel panicky, please give me the green bottle.”

  “The green bottle” contained a liquid that was briefly soporific. It would reduce the level of panic but it wouldn’t permit me to talk.

  I am uncertain about the time-sequence of certain occurrences during that dreadful period of depression.

  I know that from time to time I returned to the charming little apartment on East Sixty-fifth Street. I went out just once every twenty-four hours, to a little grocery store around the corner on Lexington, to purchase a box of spaghetti. This was my sole and solitary meal each day, and I don’t recall embellishing it with any kind of sauce.

  I never answered the phone or the downstairs bell, which buzzed beside the speaker in the kitchen.

  Two ladies managed to penetrate my otherwise total seclusion. One was a remote cousin by marriage, Nan Lanier. She kept ringing all the downstairs bells till some other tenant buzzed her in. She came to my door and knocked and called till finally I admitted her. She looked at me and asked, “Tom, have you been sleeping?”

  “Here? No, not a bit that I know of.”

  She gave me the name of a psychiatrist and dispatched me there. He took my blood pressure. It was so low that he said he didn’t know how I had managed to climb the single flight of stairs to his office. He gave me an injection to raise it. When it had risen, he wrote out for me a prescription for Doriden and Mellaril tablets and said to take two of the Doriden and one of the five-hundred-milligram Mellarils each night. And he promised they’d put me to sleep. That they did.

  The other lady who visited me was a friend of happier times whom I had encountered on a ship returning from Europe. She was very tall and stately, with an exceptionally lovely voice. For some reason her name eludes me. I thought of her as “Eleanor of Aquitaine” and I persuaded her to record some of the Camino Real passages of the character Marguerite Gautier. Her home was in Baltimore and she had a very high social position there.

  One evening she penetrated my reclusive retreat at East Sixty-fifth in the same way as Nan did.

  I recognized her voice at the door and I let her in.

  “I can’t talk,” I told her.

  “Not necessary,” she said.

  Then she sat beside me on the little apricot-colored love seat in the living room and with her long, thin hands she massaged my forehead. We didn’t talk, but her hands on my forehead gave me a bit of comfort.

  Sometime later this great lady called me from Baltimore and told me, “I am dying, Tom.”

  I said, “Oh, God, no.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  In her voice, not a trace of self-pity.

  “It’s now quite certain,” she said, “and I want you to pray that it will be soon, as soon as possible now.”

  She died a short while later.

  In my life I have known some heroic people.

  I believe it is possibly because of the tragic circumstances of her death—no, that isn’t the right way to put it, it was a most admirable and noble way to die, by informing an old friend by phone with more concern for his reaction than for her own mortal illness. Still, it was terribly shocking to me, then and now, and possibly that explains why I can remember this lady only as Eleanor of Aquitaine.

  During one of those periods in New York I somehow got in touch with my grandmother Dakin’s great-nephew, Jim Adams. I persuaded him to accompany me to Key West. After observing me there for a few days, he said, “Tom, this won’t do. My sister Stell and I know a wonderful analyst in New York and I think he can help you.” So back we went to New York.

  It was better there. Jim found us a two-story penthouse in the same block as City Center and turned me over to the analyst, one of the Karen Horney school, named Ralph Harris. He saw me daily and inexpensively, he seemed to be humanly, not just professionally, concerned. He even allowed me to have a highball beside my couch, and I gradually began to be able to talk to him.

  Jim occupied the upper floor of the penthouse and I the lower. My new sleeping medications had a euphoric, or hypnotic, effect, and for at least half an hour before I fell asleep, I would be visited by a wave of peace, the fierce knots in my head would relax, and it was like the presence of an angel beside my wide bed.

  My stoned age had partial remissions, mostly coincident with theatre productions in the sixties, all of them disastrous—due to my inability to cope with the preparations for them and with a turn, in my work, toward a new style and a new creative world with which the reviewers and the audiences found it very
hard to empathize so abruptly.

  My life was erratic. I went from place to place, often in the company of dear Marion Vaccaro—I no longer traveled with a male lover. I remember going with her to Tangier, going with her to the Greek island of Rhodes, and I remember our partnership in booze.

  In Rhodes a funny thing occurred. The American fleet was in and the harbor was brilliantly illuminated by the warships. Marion and I sat at a waterfront restaurant table, alfresco, and I complained to her of the hotel in which we were staying and which Marion had named “the concentration camp.”

  “Honey, why don’t you go over to the Hotel Des Roses and check us in there if you can?”

  Marion never refused a request from me during the many years I knew her. Drunk and reeling, off she went down the road to the Hotel Des Roses.

  I sat at the waterfront table, sodden with drink, and looked about, lizard-like, for an attractive and available member of the American Navy personnel on shore leave.

  I sat there, luckless, for a long, long time, wondering what the hell had happened to Marion.

  At last she returned and she was a sight to behold. The front of her dress was drenched with what was, to my olfactory sense, unmistakably urine.

  “Honey, how’d you get so wet?” I asked her with surprising discretion.

  “Well, baby, about halfway to the Hotel des Roses I had to pee so I just pulled up my skirt and I peed in the road and I just now discovered I peed all over my skirt.”

  “Then what’d you do?”

  “Why, I went on into the Hotel des Roses and tried to book us in there, but the fool at the desk said the place was booked solid for the next three months.”

  “Oh.”

  We both began to laugh.

  Two things of great consequence in my life occurred in the middle sixties. The lesser of the two was my alliance with a sort of caretaker-companion of great charm, humor, and almost suspect glamour of appearance whom I shall provide with the fictitious name of Ryan. I am still fond of him but I must avoid seeing him as an encounter with him, even brief and accidental, brings back to me the disastrous decade of my life, the sixties. I am afraid of associating him unfairly with the misfortunes that I suffered and barely survived in that period of profound depression and paranoia. Perhaps he came closest to representing Chance Wayne in Sweet Bird of Youth in my life, although—as best I can remember and I am trying hard to remember the best that I can—the sexual content of the attachment was minimal and was elected by him.