Final Chapters

by Jim Bernhard

  The official autopsy mentioned some marks on the body that lent credence to Dakin’s claim: “There is pronounced anterior lividity involving the head, the chest and the upper extremities. There are intense hemorrhages about the face, about the chest and left arm. There is some subconjunctival congestion and hemorrhages as well. The tip of the tongue has a slight pinkish discoloration.”

  The police report, however, indicates that Williams died of an overdose of drugs and alcohol. The New York Times reported that he had also been under treatment for heart disease.

  For a nonchurchgoer, Williams was accorded an impressive array of religious obsequies. Sime’s article notes that a service on March 1 at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home on Madison Avenue was conducted by the Reverend Sidney Lanier, an Episcopal priest and Williams’s cousin. The body was also blessed by both a Catholic and a Russian Orthodox priest, the latter at the request of Maria St. Just, a confidante of Williams. A requiem mass was celebrated on March 3 at St. Malachy’s Catholic Church on West 49th Street, known as the “Actors’ Parish.”

  Williams’s body was then moved to the Lupton Funeral Home in St. Louis, where it lay in state for two days. On Saturday, March 5, at ten o’clock in the morning, with more than 1,200 people present, a funeral mass was celebrated at the Roman Catholic Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis by the Reverend Jerome F. Wilkerson. In his homily, Wilkerson said, “The tragedy of Tennessee seems to be that the revelatory sword of suffering that pierced his heart seemed to be so much more therapeutic to others than to himself. He would seem to have remained all of his life among the walking wounded . . . He did a lot of dying and apparently had little difficulty in ‘hating his life in this world.’” Episcopalian Lanier also participated in the service, reading a passage from the Book of Ecclesiastes.

  Williams had said that he wanted to be buried at sea, in a clean, white sack, at the same spot off Florida where his idol Hart Crane had thrown himself overboard. But Dakin thought otherwise, and the body was interred in the Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis next to their mother. A monument of pink Tennessee granite was installed bearing a quotation from Williams’s Camino Real: “The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.”

  On March 8, at eight o’clock in the evening, the marquees of twenty Broadway theatres dimmed for one minute in memory of Williams, and on March 26, a memorial service was held in the Shubert Theatre. Some 1,500 people packed the auditorium, where Jessica Tandy did a monologue by Blanche from A Streetcar Named Desire, Geraldine Fitzgerald sang Williams’s favorite song, “Danny Boy,” and the recorded voice of Williams read the opening speech of The Glass Menagerie. Williams’s friend, the actress Maureen Stapleton, commented, “I think Tenn would be glad to know that he had a full house.”

  DYLAN THOMAS

  “I’ve had eighteen straight whiskeys. I think that’s the record.” That’s the boast that poet Dylan Thomas made shortly before he was carted off to St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York’s Greenwich Village, where he died four days later. Whether he actually consumed that many shots, he unquestionably drank a prodigious quantity of alcohol during his lifetime, a great deal of it in the twenty-one days before his death while visiting America for poetry readings and rehearsals of his play Under Milk Wood.

  Thomas got his start on October 27, 1914, on a typically consonant-heavy Welsh street, Cwmdonkin Drive in Swansea. His father was an English teacher at the local grammar school who, along with his wife, spoke fluent Welsh. Dylan, however, never learned the language, and although he is revered as the Welsh national poet, wrote exclusively in English. Dylan quit school when he was sixteen and went to work as a reporter for the South Wales Daily Post, a job that lasted little more than a year. After that stint, Thomas was never employed fulltime again, devoting himself to his poetry—a notoriously ill-paying occupation, even compared with other literary pursuits, and Thomas was perpetually short of money for the rest of his life.

  In his late teen years, Thomas wrote more than half of his total output of poetry, which comprises only about a hundred poems; his first collection, 18 Poems, appeared in 1934 and won favorable notice. Thomas divided his time between Wales and London.

  In 1937, he married twenty-four-year-old Caitlin Macnamara, a dancer who, at the time, was the mistress of the sixty-year-old painter Augustus John. Dylan had to borrow £3 for the wedding license, and the penurious couple resided alternately with both sets of parents. From the moment they said “I do,” the marriage was tempestuous, punctuated by money woes, drinking bouts, and adultery by both partners. In the height of World War II, the Thomases moved to London, where Dylan served as an anti-aircraft gunner. After four years of the constant danger of the blitz, they moved back to Wales and settled at Lougharne.

  Thomas’s well-known poems include “And Death Shall Have No Dominion,” “Fern Hill,” “In My Craft or Sullen Art,” “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,” and perhaps his most famous work, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” in which he urges the reader to resist death with fierce effort. Thomas also wrote the popular memoir A Child’s Christmas in Wales and the much-produced play for voices, Under Milk Wood.

  Many readers regard Thomas’s poems as difficult to interpret. He himself once described his poetic deficiencies as “Immature violence, rhythmic monotony, frequent muddle-headedness, and a very much overweighted imagery that leads often to incoherence.”

  Although young Dylan had early exposure to religious education at the Walter Road Congregational Church in Swansea and his poetry is filled with Christian allusions, most commentators regard these trappings as devices used for their poetic imagery and not from any genuine religious feeling.

  In 1950, Thomas made the first of four visits to the United States, where he was a popular lecturer and reader of his romantic, image-filled poetry. His death, on the last such trip, was a chronicle of dissipation, multiple illnesses, and medical mismanagement.

  On October 19, 1953, he arrived in New York for the final fateful tour and checked into the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street, a favorite haunt of artists and writers. According to his biographer Paul Ferris, Thomas unfortunately showed up several days late for his reservation, and he had to settle for a small, dingy back room, where he said there were “cockroaches with teeth.” With him was one of his several mistresses, Liz Reitell, the assistant of American poet and critic John Malcolm Brinnin, who had arranged Thomas’s visit.

  Ferris has reconstructed a chronology of events leading up to Thomas’s death. Between rehearsals for a production of Under Milk Wood and various lectures and symposia, Thomas spent most of his idle hours at the White Horse Tavern and various other watering holes, or in his room at the Chelsea with a bottle. Suffering from chronic asthma, gastritis, and gout, he dosed himself with beer and Old Granddad bourbon. On Friday, October 23, feeling unwell, Thomas visited Dr. Milton Feltenstein, a physician Reitell had recommended to him, and was given steroid injections. The next few days he attended performances of Under Milk Wood and other public appearances, including a party for his thirty-ninth birthday on the evening of the 27th—and downed more rounds of whiskey and beer.

  On the evening of Tuesday, November 3, Thomas went out in the evening for drinks, and when he returned to the Chelsea, he burst into tears and told Reitell he wanted to die “and go to the garden of Eden.” At two o’clock in the morning, he got out of bed, said he needed a drink, and left the hotel. When he returned an hour and a half later, he made the infamous remark about eighteen whiskeys, and then went to sleep.

  He awoke mid-morning on November 4, said he was suffocating, and went to the White Horse for two glasses of beer. When he returned to the hotel, still unwell, Dr. Feltenstein was summoned and gave him a steroid injection. Thomas slept through the afternoon, and when he awoke he had severe gastritis, with vomiting and hallucinations. Feltenstein came back and concluded Thomas had alcoholic delirium tremens and administered morphine. At midnight, Thomas’s breathing became more lab
ored and he turned blue. An ambulance was summoned to take him to St. Vincent’s Hospital, where he was given artificial respiration and oxygen.

  The medical examiner reported: “Patient brought into hospital in coma at 1:58 a.m. Remained in coma during hospital stay. History of heavy alcoholic intake. Impression on admission was acute alcoholic encephalopathy [damage to the brain], for which patient was treated without response.”

  Caitlin was notified of his illness and flew to New York. At the hospital, she was allowed only forty minutes with him, but returned later in a drunken rage, threatening to do violence to Thomas’s friends, as well as the hospital nuns and nurses. Dr. Feltenstein had her placed in a straitjacket and taken to a detox center on Long Island.

  Meanwhile, a tracheotomy was performed on Thomas to facilitate his breathing, and he was placed in an oxygen tent. He remained in a coma until November 9, when he died, at the age of thirty-nine. Evidence now indicates that Thomas never had as many as eighteen whiskeys, and that alcohol was not the direct cause of his death, which instead was a result of undiagnosed and untreated bronchitis and pneumonia, complicated by emphysema, untreated diabetes, a fatty liver, and swelling of the brain caused by lack of oxygen. A lifetime of smoking, drinking, and unhealthful eating habits undoubtedly contributed to his weakened condition.

  Thomas’s body was returned to Wales, where he was buried on November 24 from the parish church of St. Martin’s in Laugharne, followed by a reception at Brown’s Hotel. A plaque in his memory was unveiled in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey some thirty years later.

  THOMAS MERTON

  Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk under a vow of silence, but he simply wouldn’t keep quiet. Anti-war activist, civil rights crusader, poet, and mystic, he was accused by fellow Catholics of being a heretic, a Communist, and a Buddhist, and his writings were frequently censored by his monastic superiors. After an attempt to stifle a pacifist work of his, Merton’s caustic comment, reported in the Jesuit magazine America, was: “The Peace Book is not to be published. Too controversial, doesn’t give a nice image of monk. Monk concerned with peace. Bad image.” He accepted the restrictive discipline reluctantly: “I have just been instructed to shut my trap and behave, which I do since these are orders that must be obeyed and I have said what I had to say.”

  Author of countless articles and more than seventy books, including his bestselling autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, this unlikely cloistered monk was born January 31, 1915, in Prades, France, the son of two artists, an American mother and a New Zealander father. His mother died when he was six, and Thomas lived in Bermuda, France, and England with his father, who died when Thomas was seventeen. Thomas attended Cambridge, where he led a rambunctious life of drinking and womanizing, and finally enrolled at Columbia University, where he converted to Catholicism.

  In 1941, having been snubbed by the Franciscan order for his earlier debauchery, he entered the Abbey of Gethsemani, a Kentucky monastery of the ascetic monks of the Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance, known as Trappists from their origin in France at the Abbey of La Trappe. Merton was ordained to the priesthood in 1948 and spent the next twenty years writing, lecturing, advocating various progressive causes, and dodging frequent attempts by higher-ups to muzzle him.

  In the 1960s, he became interested in Asian religions, and had frequent dialogue with spiritual figures such as the Dalai Lama, the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, and Japanese writer D. T. Suzuki. “If Catholics had a little more Zen,” he said, “they would be less ridiculous than they are.”

  Merton had constant health problems, both physical and psychological. He often suffered from exhaustion, and his actions were sometimes impetuous to the point of recklessness. Questions were raised about the nature of his relationship with a young nurse who treated him during a hospital stay for a back injury; some thought their friendship might have escalated into a secret love affair.

  On December 10, 1968, Merton was in Bangkok, where he spoke at an interfaith meeting of some seventy Asian Cistercians and Benedictines, as well as non-Christians. That afternoon at his hotel, he stepped out of the shower, still wet, and attempted to move an electric fan, which electrocuted him. He was fifty-three.

  There were, however, lingering doubts about the cause of his death. The initial report in the media was that he had had a heart attack, and others have suggested a more sinister scenario—that he was assassinated by fanatics who objected to his unorthodox views. Merton’s friend Dom Jacques Leclercq concluded, “In all probability the death of Thomas Merton was due in part to heart failure, in part to an electric shock. Neither of them alone would normally be fatal.”

  Ironically, Merton’s body was flown back to the United States in a military plane returning from Viet Nam, transporting bodies of those killed in the war that Merton so vigorously opposed. After a ceremony in which monks, according to ancient custom, stood and recited Psalms next to his coffin, followed by a requiem mass attended by his fellow monks and numerous notable visitors, Merton was buried as a misty rain fell outside the Abbey of Gethsemani. In another touch of irony, instead of the usual Trappist practice of easing the body into its grave on hand-held ropes, Merton’s steel casket was noisily lowered by an elaborate metal contraption powered by electricity.

  ARTHUR MILLER

  Many people know him primarily as Mr. Marilyn Monroe—but playwright Arthur Miller had a life before and after his five-year marriage to the Hollywood goddess. Born October 17, 1915, in the fashionable Upper East Side of New York City to a family of Polish Jewish immigrants, Arthur was the second of three children. His father was a well-to-do clothing manufacturer who employed a chauffeur and had a seaside summer home in Queens, but he suffered huge losses in the stock market crash of 1929, and the impoverished family moved to modest quarters in Brooklyn.

  After high school, Miller worked in odd jobs until he had the money to attend the University of Michigan, where he wrote his first play, called No Villain. He went to New York to join the Federal Theatre Project, and there he married Mary Slattery, with whom he had two children.

  Miller’s first Broadway play, The Man Who Had All the Luck, ran for only four performances, but he bounced back three years later with All My Sons, a wartime drama that had a respectable 328 performances, won two Tony Awards, and established both Miller’s reputation and his association with director Elia Kazan. In 1949, Miller’s Death of A Salesman won the theatre’s triple crown: Tony Award, Pulitzer Prize, and New York Critics’ Circle Award. The Crucible, a play that indirectly commented on the anti-Communist phobia of McCarthyism by comparing it to the Salem witch trials, cemented his stature—and aroused suspicions among rabid Red-hunters.

  In 1956, Miller divorced Mary, married Marilyn Monroe, and was summoned to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee—not about his marital adventures, titillating though they may have been, but for his espousal of liberal causes and for the anti-authoritarian sentiments of The Crucible. The committee chair offered to exempt him from questioning in exchange for a signed photo of Monroe—but Miller declined the offer. Unlike his pal Kazan, with whom he bitterly split, Miller refused to name names, and he was held guilty of contempt of Congress and sentenced to a fine, thirty days in prison, and revocation of his passport—a conviction that was overturned.

  In 1961 Miller wrote the screenplay for The Misfits, starring Monroe and Clark Gable. Its title was prophetic, for he divorced Monroe shortly thereafter and married photographer Inge Morath. They had two children, a daughter, Rebecca, who later married actor Daniel Day-Lewis, and a son with Down syndrome, whom Miller had little to do with until Day-Lewis engineered a reconciliation. Morath died in 2002, and Miller, then eighty-seven, promptly invited a thirty-four-year-old painter named Agnes Barley to move in with him. Miller said he regarded her as his “soul mate,” but their relationship was said to be nonsexual.

  Miller was born into a moderately observant Orthodox Jewish household, but remained skeptical
about religion after his teenage years. As he said in an interview, he felt that all religions demonstrated their irrelevance during the Great Depression, and his work in various progressive social movements replaced the role of religious belief in his life.

  In late 2004, battling an undisclosed form of cancer, pneumonia, and congestive heart failure, he was hospitalized, then released into hospice care at his sister’s New York apartment in January of 2005. He insisted on returning to his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, where he died at the age of eighty-nine on the evening of February 10, surrounded by his children and his companion, Barley. Within hours of his death, reported the New York Daily News, Rebecca and Daniel Day-Lewis ordered Barley to vacate the premises.

  Miller was buried at Roxbury Center Cemetery.

  ROALD DAHL

  Willy Wonka’s creator lost his faith in religion after being counseled by a former Archbishop of Canterbury. When Roald Dahl and his wife, the actress Patricia Neal, lost their seven-year-old daughter to measles encephalitis, they sought comfort from an old friend recently retired from the highest ecclesiastical office in the Anglican community. As Dahl recalled the episode in a Daily Telegraph interview, he asked the former Archbishop if his daughter’s beloved dog would be with her in heaven. The churchman disapproved of the very question. “From that moment on,” said Dahl, “I’m afraid I began to wonder whether there really was a God or not.”

  Baptized as a Lutheran in a family of Norwegian immigrants, Dahl was born September 13, 1916, in Cardiff, Wales. He was sent to boarding schools, where he was educated as an Anglican. He shunned university and went to work for Shell Oil in Tanganyika, then joined the RAF when World War II broke out. After being badly injured when he crashed his plane, he was posted as an air attaché to Washington, D.C., where he engaged in a little espionage on the side as a British spy, had affairs with countless glamorous women (including playwright Clare Boothe Luce and cosmetics queen Elizabeth Arden), and met the British writer C. S. Forester. Forester wanted to write an article about Dahl’s war exploits, but Dahl wrote his own account of his adventures, which Forester sold to the Saturday Evening Post for $900.