by John Lahr
By the play’s end, the Writer has been buffeted as much by a vision of his future as by his past. The last words of Vieux Carré resonate two ways: as an augury and as an epitaph. Setting out on the literary adventure of a lifetime, the Writer opens the door to the boardinghouse:
(As he first draws the door open, he is forced back a few steps by a cacophony of sound: the waiting storm of his future—mechanical racking cries of pain and pleasure, snatches of song. It fades out. Again there is the urgent call of the clarinet. He crosses to the open door.)
WRITER: . . . They’re disappearing behind me. Going. People you’ve known in places do that: they go when you go. The earth seems to swallow them up, the walls absorb them like moisture, remain with you only as ghosts: their voices are echoes, fading but remembered.
(The clarinet calls again. He turns for a moment at the door.)
This house is empty now.
In early drafts of Vieux Carré, there is a scene in which, in the excitement of collaboration, a playwright accidentally tips backward into the orchestra pit. He clambers out. “Old cats know how to fall,” he says. By the time Vieux Carré got to Broadway, Williams wasn’t so sure he could bounce back. Shuttling between Bermuda, Atlantic City, and Key West, he avoided most of the previews. “None of us saw Tennessee for a long time until we had major problems with several scenes,” Sylvia Sidney, who played Mrs. Wire, the witchy, intrusive landlady, said. “When he finally arrived, his excuse was, ‘I need to see it on its feet!’ By then it was almost too late.” Williams was hiding from the critics even more than from the production. “I am as frightened as ever of the critics,” he wrote to his director, Arthur Allan Seidelman, in early May 1977, contemplating the prospect of bad reviews. “If we get a ‘Stop’ sign from them, I think we should do something quite spectacularly unusual like publicly challenging them to a debate.” Williams went on, “I am personally quite ready to have a final showdown with them before flying to England and emigrating to Australia because of an unremitting barrage of excrement from those or those who employ them.”
As it happened, Vieux Carré lasted only five hapless performances, defeated by poor direction, poor design, and poor producers. “It developed that the backers lacked cash,” Williams wrote in his postmortem, adding, “Behind my back the director went ga-ga and removed the climactic scene of Part One. The narrator (his boy-friend) was an amateurish performer in a part that demanded high professional skill.” Although the production was given a drubbing, Williams’s writing was not. “Tennessee Williams’s voice is the most distinctively poetic, the most idiosyncratically moving, and at the same time the most firmly dramatic to have come the American theatre’s way—ever,” Walter Kerr wrote in the New York Times. “No point in calling the man our best living playwright. He is our best playwright, and let qualifications go hang.” A few American critics, Kerr among them, indicated an interest in seeing future productions. In August 1978, a revised London production of Vieux Carré, directed by Keith Hack, was a hit, and it restored honor to the play, which went on to be one of Williams’s most popular late works.
IN VIEUX CARRÉ, Williams wrote himself from the outside; in his next major play, Clothes for a Summer Hotel: A Ghost Play, Williams wrote himself from the inside. He took as his subject the tormented, romantic saga of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, a move that Brendan Gill of The New Yorker likened to “body snatching.” The play is set in Highland Hospital, the asylum near Asheville, North Carolina, that burned down with Zelda in it, seven years after Scott had died, in 1940. The literary couple, now ghosts, argue and mingle in flashback with apparitions from their reckless heyday in the twenties: Ernest and Hadley Hemingway, Gerald and Sara Murphy. Walter Kerr spoke for the largely bemused general public when he declared in his negative review in the Times, “We are simply being told what we already know. We don’t know why we are bothering to retrace the terrain now.”
What was Williams really trying to tell the public? He was far too clever and too committed a playmaker simply to rehash the famous dead for profit. By making the Fitzgeralds ghosts, Williams abstracted them from history and from their social façade; they existed for him as pure idea. “In a sense all plays are ghost plays, since players are not actually whom they play,” he said in an author’s note. “Our reason for taking extraordinary license with time and place is that in an asylum and on its grounds liberties of this kind are quite prevalent: and also these liberties allow us to explore in more depth what we believe is truth of character.” Williams was haunted not so much by the truth of the Fitzgeralds’ story, which was well known, as by the spiritual truth of his own story, which was not.
“Zelda is the type of character I can deal with very easily, having a sister who suffered from mental illness and myself having perhaps moments of it,” Williams said, when the play went into rehearsal on New Year’s Day in 1980, adding, “Yes, I guess I also felt a kind of kinship with Scott. He was a prodigy when his first book came out, but he was afflicted by alcohol, and during the last years of his life, his books were virtually out of print. I also have gone through a period of eclipse in public favor.” On the surface of the Fitzgeralds’ tale—the waste of talent, the mental illness, the tempestuous lives lived on the edge—it was easy for Williams to draw lines of emotional connection. But their story also spoke to something deeper in Williams’s own creative survival, something he both knew and didn’t know, what he called “the brutality of the unconscious”: his cannibalization of himself and others for his art.
On the day that Clothes for a Summer Hotel went into rehearsal, the director, José Quintero, told the press, “In Tennessee’s work, it is always the question of survival. Imagine this man to whom people have said, ‘You’re dried up, you can’t write any more,’ still writing, still coming to rehearsals in his raccoon coat. That’s what it’s all about—surviving in the theatre, surviving in the profession.” Clothes for a Summer Hotel was about the price of that survival.
“Scott used Zelda’s life in his books, and that theme echoes Tennessee’s use of his own experience and his sister’s experience in his work,” Geraldine Page, who played Zelda, said. That appropriation is at the core of the argument between Scott and Zelda. “Is that really you, Scott? Are you my lawful husband, the celebrated F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of my life?” Zelda asks, in her first line to Scott, who is waiting for her on a bench outside the “unrealistically tall” black iron gates of the asylum. Later, in the same scene, she charges Scott with being a kind of psychic imperialist who has eaten her alive: “What was important to you was to absorb and devour!” she says. The real Zelda’s claim—as laid out in her own novel, Save Me the Waltz, and in Nancy Milford’s 1970 biography, Zelda—was that her husband not only had used her as a model for the heroines in his fiction, and published her stories under his name, but also had borrowed freely from her letters and diaries for his fiction. (“Mr. Fitzgerald . . . seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home,” the real Zelda wrote in a review of The Beautiful and Damned in 1922.) Her artistic ambitions thwarted, Zelda went slowly mad, obsessed in her later years with the idea of becoming a ballerina. “The will to cry out remains,” she says in the play.
At the opening of the play, Scott offers Zelda a duplicate of the wedding ring she’s thrown away. “Call it a ring of, of—a covenant with the past that’s always still present, dearest,” he says. Scott will not accept responsibility for his part in her destruction. Toward the end, in a memorable final aria, Zelda calls Scott out on his image of himself as a good man—a gentleman and an artist—which has prevented him from seeing the damage he has inflicted:
ZELDA:—I’m approaching him now, no son of God but a gentleman shadow of him. It’s incredible how, against appalling odds, dear Scott achieved a Christly parallel through his honoring of long commitments, even now to me, a savage ghost in a bedraggled tutu, yes it’s a true and incredible thing.
SCOTT: (softly, as he falls back onto the bench) Incredible?—Yes.
(She pauses briefly before him; then touches his shoulder and crosses to downstage center.)
ZELDA: . . . The incredible things are the only true things, Scott. Why do you have to go mad to make a discovery as simple as that? Who is fooling whom with this pretence that to exist is a credible thing? The mad are not so gullible. We’re not taken in by such a transparent falsity, oh, no, what we know that you don’t know—(She is now facing the audience.) Or don’t dare admit that you know is that to exist is the original and greatest of incredible things. Between the first wail of an infant and the last gasp of the dying—it’s all an arranged pattern of—submission to what’s been prescribed for us unless we escape into madness or into acts of creation. . . . The latter option was denied me, Scott, by someone not a thousand miles from here. (She faces Scott.) Look at what was left me!
But Scott cannot, will not, take in what she’s saying. He changes the subject. Zelda sits down beside him and continues her speech—a speech whose litany of loss recalls Williams’s own retreat from real and imagined defeats:
—As I grew older, Goofo, the losses accumulated in my heart, the disenchantments steadily increased. That’s usual, yes? Simply the process of aging.—Adjustments had to be made to faiths that had faded as candles into daybreak. In their place, what? Sharp light cast on things that appalled me, that blew my mind out, Goofo. Then—The wisdom, the sorrowful wisdom of acceptance. Wouldn’t accept it. Romantics won’t, you know. Liquor, madness, more or less the same thing. We’re abandoned or we’re put away, and if put away, why, then, fantasy runs riot, hallucinations bring back times lost. . . .—Yes, I went back to the world of vision which was my only true home.
At the finale, as Zelda moves for the last time through the gates and back into the asylum, Scott tries to follow her. “The gates are iron, they won’t admit you or ever release me again,” she says, as the gates close behind her. “I’m not your book! Anymore! I can’t be your book anymore! Write yourself a new book!” Scott thrusts the ring through the bars. “The ring, please take it, the covenant with the past—[she disappears]—still always present, Zelda!” he says, in the play’s final line. “His haunted eyes ask a silent question which he must know cannot be answered,” the last stage direction reads.
On its surface—the level on which the first-night critics dealt with it—Clothes for a Summer Hotel was the somewhat aimless tale of a celebrated embattled couple airing their differences. However, it was, on a deeper psychological level, an argument within Williams’s famously divided self. Both victimizer and victim, Williams had devoured himself for the sake of his work. This idea is spelled out in the play by the ghost of Hemingway, who talks about his whole-cloth appropriation of Fitzgerald’s life for his own short stories. “You see, I can betray even my oldest close friend, the one most helpful in the beginning,” he tells Scott. “That may have been at least partly the reason for which I executed myself not long after, first by attempting to walk into the propeller of a plane—then having failed, by blasting my exhausted brains out with an elephant gun.” Hemingway continues, “I may have pronounced on myself this violent death sentence to expiate the betrayals I’ve strewn behind me.”
Williams, similarly consumed with guilt over his exploitation of himself and of Rose for his greater glory, chose a slower suicide than Hemingway, but it was self-destruction nonetheless. When Zelda screams at Scott to “write yourself a new book,” her words play both as an indictment of Fitzgerald and as an injunction from Williams to himself—to stop feeding solipsistically off his own demise. From the mid-fifties, in Williams’s mind, creation and betrayal were psychologically conjoined. To give life to his characters Williams preyed on himself—drawing on drugs and promiscuity to engineer the extravagant conversion of despair into art. In seeking his liberation, he became his own oppressor. The beseeching hand, pushing a ring through the asylum bars in Clothes for a Summer Hotel, is a punishing image of this tormented, tormenting stalemate. Like Fitzgerald, Williams remained devoted to a covenant that he’d long since betrayed: the purity of romantic transcendence through art.
The play opened at the Cort Theatre on March 26, 1980, Williams’s sixty-ninth birthday. At the curtain call, the audience stood to applaud Williams; he took a bow. The next day—“Tennessee Williams Day” by mayoral proclamation—Williams took brickbats. At the opening-night cast party, Williams had sat downcast in a shadowy corner of a Third Avenue restaurant, with St. Just by his side, as news of the first reviews filtered in. “He said he wanted to fly away on angels’ wings,” Rader, who had brought Pat Kennedy Lawford with him to the party, recalled. “Maria snapped, ‘You’ll get those soon enough.’ She was pissed at the clear failure of the play and, as usual, responded by patronizing him. ‘We did our best, didn’t we, dear?’ ‘We mustn’t be too hard on ourselves.’ ” Williams had, he said, “hung on for ten years to have a success in the American theater; Clothes, with its celebrated cast and its popular subject matter, was his best roll of the dice, but he had crapped out. Pat sat down beside him and held his hand. “She thought he was dangerously despondent,” Rader said. “To cheer him up she offered to give him a party that weekend.” Williams “beamed,” according to Rader, and said he’d be delighted to come.
Kenneth Haigh and Geraldine Page as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald in Clothes for a Summer Hotel
When Williams arrived at the party, with St. Just in tow, most of the twenty or so guests, who included Anne Jackson and Eli Wallach, Philip Kingsley, Vass Voglis, Jan Cushing, and Rader, were having drinks in the flower-filled drawing room of Kennedy’s elegant eighth-floor Sutton Place South duplex, overlooking gardens and the East River. The foyer of the lobby had been decorated with a five-foot-high balloon that read “HURRAY FOR TENNESSEE,” but Williams brought little of that good cheer with him across the apartment’s threshold. “He seemed nervous, depressed, and unsure of himself,” Rader said. Williams had been there for about ten minutes when he bolted across the drawing room, pulled open the French doors, ran out onto the balcony, and clambered over the railings to throw himself off. “Eli was the first to grab him,” Rader said. “It was very alarming. Resisting, he was pulled back into the room, then sort of threw his shoulders back and gave a sickly smile and shrugged. It was a close call.”
Later that evening, Wallach read Williams’s comic poem about postcoital palaver, “Life Story,” then pointed out a ring he was wearing, on which the face of tragedy morphed into the face of comedy. “I have had it all my life,” Wallach said, “and there is nothing that I cherish and value more than this ring. It has brought me luck. And there is no one I would give it to, no man I love more, than you.” He took off the ring and handed it to Williams, who accepted it tearfully. Wallach then raised his glass and toasted “the greatest living playwright.” The others stood for Williams and raised their glasses. “Eli, thank you, baby,” Williams said. “I don’t know how true what you say is, or whether it matters if it is. It’s nice to hear it from a friend.”
Williams certainly didn’t hear it from the critics. As the reviews rolled in, so did the vitriol, which could be measured by the headlines alone: “Slender Is the Night” (Newsweek), “ ‘Clothes’ Needs Some Tailoring” (New York Post). “There is nothing necessary about this ghost play, nothing that needed saying in this world,” John Simon wrote in New York. “The action is set in the 1940s, the design comes out of the 1950s, the ideology belongs the 1960s. Leaving the theatre, I felt in my 80s,” Robert Brustein remarked in the New Republic, adding that Williams should perhaps book “a flight to Three Mile Island on a one-way ticket.” “This is an evening at the morgue,” Rex Reed declared in the New York Daily News.
For all its narrative problems, Clothes for a Summer Hotel is a much better written and more evocative play than the version those first-nighters saw. As Williams wrote to Kazan, “ ‘Clothes’ was a victim of a bad first act, miscasting of Scott”—who was played by the British actor Kenneth Haigh—“a stingy producer, and Gerry Page�
��s problem with projecting her voice, so bad that all the theatres we played had to be miked. Much as I love Quintero, he vacillated too much over crucial problems, in my opinion.” Nonetheless, in a desperate gesture, so that word of mouth would have time to build, Williams stumped up twenty thousand dollars to help cover the costs for a second week. “Couldn’t the son of a bitch at least let us get out quick?” Page said on hearing the news. The actors got out quick enough. The play closed on Easter Sunday, having played seven previews and fifteen performances in New York, twenty-three shows in Chicago, and thirty-nine shows in Washington, and losing the best part of half a million dollars. Williams told Earl Wilson, the New York Post’s gossip columnist, that he’d been a victim of “critical homicide.” He vowed never to return to Broadway, which was just as well because his illustrious career on the Rialto was over.
In 1976, at his induction to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Williams had heard the words of Robert Penn Warren: “No dramatist writing in English has created a more strongly characteristic and memorable world.” At the Kennedy Center Honors, in 1979, he heard Kazan call him “a playwright in the way that a lion is a lion. Nothing but.” Accepting the 1980 Presidential Medal of Freedom, Williams heard President Jimmy Carter say that he’d “shaped the history of modern American theater.” But for the remainder of his life, Williams never heard a major American critic praise a new play of his.
“I WILL NEVER recover from what they did to me with ‘Clothes,’ ” Williams wrote to Mitch Douglas, his new representative at ICM. (Barnes had left the agency.) “But I will not stop working till they drop me in the sea. . . . I think I know better than anyone how little time there’s left for me. I’ll use it well. I trust you to help me with it.” Douglas had been a Williams fan before he became a Williams functionary; he had read every published work. He was firm, feisty, and fun. He began at ICM as a temp typist between acting jobs; in 1974, he became a full-time agent, and by 1978 Williams was his client. “Tennessee was difficult because Tennessee was crazy. There’s no diplomatic way to say that,” Douglas said. “He ate Bill Barnes alive. One of the reasons Billy was out at ICM was because Tennessee was taking all his time. I was told, ‘Don’t let him take up all your time the way it was with Billy Barnes.’ ” Williams’s literary life—the calls, the productions, the correspondence, the personal appearances, the travel—was a three-ring circus, of which Douglas became the harassed ringmaster.
