Another Life

by Michael Korda

  In the end, after several years of revising, Moïse was finally published, though its sales disappointed Tennessee, and me as well. Most of the reviewers seemed baffled by the book, with its stagy plotline and the unbridled lyricism of its dialogue. James Leo Herlihy commented fulsomely that it was “like a wild street song heard on the eve of a Doom’s Day [sic] that is forever postponed,” while Elia Kazan, rather more cautiously, responded to the book I had sent him by simply writing, “Tennessee Williams is a great man.” The truth was, nobody knew quite what to make of the book, and there was a natural tendency to compare it to Tennessee’s major plays, however unfairly. Myself, I thought it uncommonly courageous of Tennessee to have tried his hand at a novel, particularly one that celebrated the fatal decline of the characters’ sexual and artistic powers.

  In any event, the completion of Moïse was enough to persuade Tennessee to move forward with a collection of his later short stories. Even so fervent an admirer of his as Lady Maria St. Just, who was to become the devoted and fiercely protective literary coexecutor of his estate, has remarked that “[Tennessee] is not a great short story writer like Chekhov.” There is no denying that, though it was a form that suited him better than the novel. At any rate, Tennessee wrote immense numbers of short stories, many of which were unpublished, and was still writing them at a tremendous rate in the early 1980s. What he proposed was to gather together those he liked the best, from both the unpublished ones and the most recent ones, in a volume called Fairy Tales, a title that he was unable to mention without a fit of giggles.

  I was of two minds about the title myself. That part of my brain that is devoted to publishing loved the idea. “Fairy Tales by Tennessee Williams” might well have been the first really successful collection of literary short stories in the history of book publishing, and the title would have all but guaranteed a storm of publicity and controversy, to which Tennessee looked forward with glee. The part of my brain that is not devoted to publishing thought that it was risky and in doubtful taste. Every time the subject came up at marketing meetings opinion was equally divided. However, Dick Snyder loved the title and told me to ignore the doubters. “It’ll sell books,” he said firmly, which was just what Tennessee thought, though in his case he was also anxious to shock those of his admirers who, in his opinion, took him too seriously. Like many another genius, Tennessee craved the support and protection of those close to him who felt it to be their business to look after him, but chafed at their concern at the same time. He liked to set them against each other—indeed the main reason why Tennessee had chosen Billy Barnes as his agent was that Barnes, with his sense of fun, his Southern accent, and spirited campiness (on those occasions when he chose to be campy, for he could be perfectly businesslike when he wanted to be) didn’t seem serious enough to Tennessee’s camarilla, who were, for the most part, plus royalistes que le roi. When I expressed my doubts about the title to Tennessee, he told me, “Loosen up and have some fun, baby,” with a certain warning snap of venom in his voice, rare between us, and that was that.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Billy Barnes said to me later. “He’s just having his fun. He’ll change his mind before the book hits the stores, you’ll see.”

  A greater worry was the stories themselves, many of which were incomplete, impossible to understand, or simply bizarre. Some sense of them can be gained from their titles, which included “The Killer Chicken and the Closet Queen,” “Mother Yaws,” and “Tent Worms.” A note from my assistant John Herman, no mean judge of literary fiction, read, “For whatever it’s worth these seem to me brilliantly written, humorous, but utterly outlandish and very hard to follow.” That was putting it kindly.

  One of the stories, “The Donsinger Women and Their Handyman Jack,” seemed to have been composed by Tennessee in many different places and states of mind. Some of it was typed on yellowing writing paper, some of it on lined paper torn from a notebook, some of it on the back of writing paper from the United Nations Plaza Hotel. Changes were scrawled in various colors, some recent and bold, others ancient and scarcely legible. The Donsinger women are a large family of sisters occupying a crumbling mansion in what had once been a respectable neighborhood in some Texas town. Predatory, possibly cannibalistic, and unapologetically nymphomaniacal, the sisters are nightmare creations. They subsist by rummaging through the garbage cans of restaurants by night, and they spend their days in rocking chairs on the veranda of the house, making lewd conversation. One of them finds a young man named Jack in the street. Jack has been kicked off the family ranch by his father. She hides him in the unused henhouse, hoping he will serve as her handyman and stud, but it turns out that even though he is spectacularly well endowed, that is not on his agenda. He is a poet and has eyes only for beautiful young Oriental men delivering Chinese food. The sisters are eventually incarcerated in the state mental asylum, after much violence and bloodshed involving the police and the National Guard, but they escape from there only to self-destruct. Jack is eventually spurned by the Chinese youth he loves and is last seen sunk in grief on the porch of the decaying Donsinger house. The moral of the story is that grief, to the person of feeling, is a permanent wound, not a transient state. “It takes up residence in the human heart” and will last “as long as the heart endures.” To which Tennessee added, perhaps as an afterthought, a moving and simple phrase that is Tennessee at his best (as much of the rest of the story is Tennessee at his worst): “And the heart is a stubborn organ.”

  “The heart is a stubborn organ” might also have served as Tennessee Williams’s motto and was certainly the theme of each of these stories, whatever their merits (or lack thereof). By this time, in 1982, Tennessee was on a roller coaster of pills and booze, and his writing showed the consequences, and he knew it. Yet even in “The Donsinger Women,” there are flashes of the old lyricism, the occasional wonderful phrase, and the sense of a powerful imagination going hauntingly out of control.

  Tennessee himself could tell that the stories needed work, and I spent a good many hours with him trying to make sense of them, but even with the best will in the world Tennessee’s heart wasn’t in it. He wanted the stories published, but he found it hard to concentrate on revising them and often toyed with the idea of giving up the whole project. Many of the older stories were in comparatively better shape, but by fits and starts he tried to revise those, too. A couple of years after we had signed the contract for Fairy Tales, and over six years since he had first broached the subject, Tennessee was beginning to have second thoughts, just as we were about to announce their publication in our catalog. He called me out of the blue one day, just as Billy Barnes had warned, to say that he didn’t know whose idea it had been to call the collection Fairy Tales, but he couldn’t allow it. “It’s real tacky, baby,” Tennessee said, despite the fact that it had been his idea from the beginning.

  From an outsider’s point of view, it was easy enough to guess that Tennessee’s life was coming apart at the seams. He was hard to reach, restless, and plagued by ill health of an unspecified nature, complaining of headaches, personal problems, and the ubiquitous oncoming cold. A photograph intended for the jacket of Fairy Tales shows him wearing a neat straw hat and smiling seraphically, his eyes completely obscured by big dark glasses. The effect is to cancel out the smile or contradict it, and there is a kind of ghostly sadness to the picture, as if he had already guessed it would never be used and was mildly amused by the fact.

  Indeed, Fairy Tales (now referred to more prosaically as “Untitled Collection of Short Stories”) was postponed several times. By now, I had real concerns. Every time a book is postponed after appearing in a publisher’s catalog, the orders are canceled. When new orders are solicited, they are invariably fewer, and after a number of postponements, the bookstores simply lose interest and decide the book is never going to happen. At that point, it falls into limbo, from which no amount of effort is likely to rescue it. This book was on its way there rapidly.

  After consider
able difficulty, I managed to pin Tennessee down to a meeting. I turned up on time to find him in his bathrobe, a towel wound around his neck. He did not look good: His face was puffy, sallow rather than tanned, and there was a noticeable tremor to his hands. The blinds were pulled in the living room, but we sat down there anyway, in partial darkness. Around us, covering every flat surface in the room, was the evidence of a party that must have ended only hours ago—bottles, glasses, overflowing ashtrays. Tennessee’s legs were bare, and he was wearing red morocco slippers. He seemed baffled by my presence, despite several telephone calls to confirm our meeting. From time to time, he glanced uneasily toward the kitchen, where, as usual, somebody was crashing about in a rage. Tennessee pulled the towel around his neck a little tighter. He coughed gently. “A cold,” he said. “I woke up with this sinus headache.” He rubbed his thumb and forefinger down his nose, to indicate pain, knocking his glasses off. He replaced them and stared glumly into the middle distance.

  I offered to come back another time, if he wasn’t feeling well. Tennessee waved away the suggestion. He was feeling well enough. There followed a long pause, interrupted from time to time by somebody whistling “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman” off-key in the kitchen, or possibly the bedroom, it was hard to be sure of the geography of the apartment. One sensed that there was a world beyond this room, but like characters on a stage in a play, we were cut off from it.

  Had I had breakfast? Tennessee wanted to know.

  I nodded. I was almost ready for lunch, in fact.

  Tennessee sighed. “Ah have not,” he said gravely, and picking up a glass he emptied the contents of several other glasses into it, swirled it carefully to mix it up, and took a gulp. I wondered what it contained. For all I knew he might have been mixing vodka, bourbon, and curaçao, or for all he knew, for that matter. He smiled. “That’s better,” he said. What were we going to talk about?

  I pulled the manuscript of one of the short stories out of my briefcase, together with some notes that John Herman and I had made. Tennessee glanced at them with a combination of deep suspicion and alarm. He did not seem to be in any state to go over them.

  The phone beside him rang. He picked it up and listened intently. “Uh-huh,” he said, “uh-huh, uh-huh, baby.” He listened some more. I could hear the voice on the other end—a thin, angry, electronic squeak. Tennessee closed his eyes, wincing. “I’m real sorry,” he said. “Uh-huh … No, real sorry, baby … I mean it.…” He listened some more, then drew a card from the pocket of his dressing gown. He held it up close to his eyes, but was unable to focus on it. He held it as far away as he could, at arm’s length, but still didn’t seem able to read it. He turned it upside down, then, in a pleading voice, reading it as desperately as a man on television who had forgotten his glasses might look helplessly toward the TelePrompTer for the words of his speech, unable to make out a word on its screen, he said very slowly, “No, baby, I can’t talk about it now, I’m in the middle of a meeting with …” He frowned, and tried turning the card the other way around. “With mah editor …” A long, anguished pause as he searched for the name, then, finally, with an audible sigh of relief, he thought he had it and gave it the old college try: “With mah editor Michael Kop-ta …” He gave me a questioning look over the top of his crooked glasses, and I shook my head. He put down the receiver.

  “Michael Korda,” I said.

  He nodded. “I know, baby,” he said softly. “It was on the tip of mah tongue.”

  He sent me a very nice letter a few days later, just to make sure my feelings hadn’t been hurt by his lapse of memory, but, as I assured him, I didn’t mind a bit. Tennessee was a sweet man, and now that I’m closer to the age he was then or past it, I’m having trouble remembering people’s names, too, even without a hangover. About the confusion in the two stories I had come to discuss with him, Tennessee later commented: “Maybe [they] got mixed up a bit in your office. Offices do that to Mss., viz ICM … Sorry they didn’t make your Fall list … Fondly, Tennessee.”

  He sent me a draft of a new story, “Old Sweetheart of the Keys,” about two cousins who own a decrepit bar on Dry Bone Drive, one of whom sits rocking on the veranda. Toward the end of the story, Tennessee had added in his unsteady handwriting a warning from one of the cousins to the other: “You can’t rock faster than death.” It was an image that appeared in my mind, not long afterward, when I heard that he had died in that cluttered apartment in February 1983, from a lethal, and perhaps deliberate, overdose of pills and alcohol, during which he choked to death on the cap of a pill bottle he was trying to open with his teeth.

  We never did publish Fairy Tales. Somewhere in the margin of one of his stories, he had typed: “I am being interviewed by Gayblevision and I think I am being quite indiscreet in some of ’y [my] disclosures, but then I think, ‘When have I ever been other 5wise%(and is not all art an indiscretion if it is true.’ ”

  He had promised me one more story, “The Final Strategic Retreat of General Scronch,” and to this day I’m sorry it never arrived.

  CHAPTER 26

  ONCE S&S was firmly established as part of “the G+W family,” flying to the West Coast became more frequent. After all, Paramount, our “sister corporation,” was there, and if any synergy was ever to take place, there would have to be some exchange of ideas on a person-to-person basis. Dick, who could take advantage of the G+W corporate airplanes, was frequently in Los Angeles and was soon on a first-name basis with everyone who mattered at Paramount. I was less enthusiastic about going there, but eventually Dick somehow managed to plant in Bluhdorn’s feverish mind the notion that I was the key to the synergy he craved between S&S and Paramount.

  Since synergy was the ostensible raison d’ětre for having bought us in the first place, Bluhdorn was determined to see it flourish, or at least to produce an example of it for the shareholders, and it was eventually decided that Barry Diller and I were to meet at regular intervals so that I could brief him on the books we had under contract, just in case one of them might sound to him like a possible movie.

  For many reasons, these meetings never took place, the most important of them being that Diller didn’t want to hear the plots of a lot of novels that he wasn’t interested in. His interest was aroused only by the novels he couldn’t get access to—those he could find out about simply by listening to me he automatically wrote off as useless. When he was in New York, he found innumerable reasons why he was unable to see me; when I offered—unwillingly—to see him in L.A., he also found reasons why that was impossible. Months, even years, went by, punctuated by angry memos and telephone calls from Bluhdorn, demanding to know when a meeting was going to take place. Eventually, Bluhdorn simply set the date himself, sent me over an airline ticket by messenger, and told me to go or else.

  A limo picked me up at the airport and took me directly to Paramount, where I was to meet Diller for lunch in his office. When I arrived there, however, he wasn’t there, though a lavish cold lunch had been spread out in his sunny, spacious office. He was in Palm Springs and would probably not arrive before three, his secretary informed me. I had brought some manuscripts with me, so I helped myself to lunch and settled down to read. Eventually, reluctantly, Diller arrived, full of apologies, and sat down to listen, with the expression of a man who is about to undergo root-canal surgery.

  I didn’t blame him. Nothing is more boring than listening to somebody tell the plot of a novel. I resist listening to this kind of thing myself at all costs, even to the point of rudeness. My heart went out to Diller, but I had a job to do.

  I promised Diller I would make it as quick and painless as I could. There was just one small point, I told him—traditionally, whenever somebody from outside the movie industry offers a movie person an idea or a story, he or she will listen politely—or as politely as anyone can listen whose only desire is to get on with the next appointment—then say, the moment their interlocutor pauses for breath, “Let me explain to you why that won’t make
a movie.”

  It doesn’t matter what the story in question is—it could be Gone with the Wind or Funny Girl—it is in the nature of a fixed, knee-jerk response to anything coming from outside “the industry,” or to the east of the San Bernardino Mountains. I explained to Diller that I had no vested interest in any of the novels I was about to talk to him about, that I was here only because Bluhdorn had made me come. I would do my number, he would listen, then I would go, and we could both report that synergy had taken place. The only thing, I begged him, was not to explain to me why none of these books could be made into movies, first of all because I didn’t care, and second because, having grown up in the movie business, I didn’t believe a word of it. Many of the things that “couldn’t be made into a movie” were eventually made into movies, often with success. A large number of the things that were “naturals” as movies were made and turned out to be flops—there were no rules.

  Diller nodded sagely and agreed. He leaned back and waved me to begin. I read off the first title on my list and quickly summarized the plot. Before I could finish, Diller had raised his hand to silence me. “Let me explain to you why that won’t make a movie,” he said.

  I shook my head and tore up the list.

  Diller raised an eyebrow, but he seemed pleased and relieved. “I’ll let Charlie know that we had a successful meeting,” he said pleasantly, rising to shake my hand. He saw me to the door, we both reported a major blow for synergy, and the meeting never took place again—indeed, once it happened, Bluhdorn apparently took it off his checklist and never mentioned it again.

  IT WOULD not have occurred to any of us in the 1970s that we would one day look back on it as a golden age, at least in terms of the publishing business. Admittedly, the period in which the majority of publishing houses were still privately owned had gone, and with it the close, day-to-day relationship that had once existed between ownership and the editorial staff. Except for a few cases—Farrar, Straus and Giroux, for example, or (hanging on by the fingernails) Viking—ownership was now more remote, in some cases so remote as to be invisible. S&S was an exception only in the sense that Bluhdorn occasionally took a personal interest in our affairs, partly because he liked books and partly because Dick Snyder had won his respect.