Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

by John Lahr

  On his first trip to Key West, to discuss Stopped Rocking, Douglas called Williams from his hotel and asked to come over. “Well, that would be difficult,” Williams said. “Robert got wasted last night and wrecked the car. Now he’s sitting on the front porch with a gun in his lap threatening to blow the brains out of anyone who approaches. I would say we’re under siege.” Douglas quickly learned that to handle his new client, strict boundaries would have to be maintained. When St. Just called him to complain about Williams’s New York apartment—“Mitch, the windows are filthy and the floors are even worse”—Douglas told her, “I don’t do windows. You want a maid, call a maid service. You need some help with business, I’ll be happy to help.” Inevitably, though, even the no-nonsense Douglas sometimes had to deal with Williams’s transgressive antics. At the Kennedy Center Honors luncheon, for instance, Williams and Maureen Stapleton got drunk. After lunch, as they waited for their limousine, a Marine band was playing beside the driveway. Stapleton went up to the conductor. “You guys play so fucking good. Do you know ‘Moon River’?” she said. The band struck up the song. Stapleton and Williams began dancing; they waltzed themselves into a forbidden area of the White House. “I went to the Sergeant of Arms, and I said, ‘Will you help me get them out of here?’ ” Douglas recalled. “Two Marines got under Tennessee and two under Maureen’s arm. They walked them to the limo.”

  Feeling that “time runs short,” and determined to live in the slipstream of his fame, Williams proved increasingly difficult for Douglas to wrangle. In July 1981, a few months before the Off-Broadway premiere of Something Cloudy, Something Clear—a memory play in which the adult Williams revisited and commented on his first experience of love, with Kip Kiernan, in 1940—Williams wrote to Douglas suggesting that they “level with each other.” “Let’s do,” Douglas replied; in a piquant, four-page, single-spaced letter he made clear a lot of what was cloudy in Williams’s behavior:

  You’ve been quoted in the press saying that you did not approve the STREETCAR remake deal and the negotiations went forward without your knowledge. Also you’ve stated that you never approved of Sylvester Stallone as Stanley. Obviously you’ve forgotten that we discussed the possibility of selling these rights for a year before the Martin Poll negotiation began. When I told you I could get a lot of money—$750,000 or a million—for these rights, but Stallone would be included as Stanley, you indicated that you didn’t care if Stanley were played by a banana. You indicated that you needed the money and might as well have it while you were around—“I’m not interested in anything posthumous.” And I do agree with you. You’ve worked long, hard and well and should enjoy the rewards—and now. When the Jerry Parker Newsday article appeared quoting you as saying you didn’t know about the deal and that Stallone was a “terrible actor,” you called me denying the story, asking to get a denial and attributing the comment to one of the several people in the room with you when Parker was interviewing you. I got a denial through Liz Smith, and within a day you went to North Carolina and made the same comments to a different set of reporters. Stallone has walked out of the project. Martin Poll wants to honor the deal and put it together with a cast of your approval in spite of the fact that none of the major studios think that STREETCAR is now a hot property, and in fact the highest previous offer I could get was $250,000. Do you want this $750,000 deal . . . or not? A simple yes or no will do.

  You also commented in North Carolina, “Not only do I work very hard but I have to represent myself as well. My representative is only interested in using me for profit.” I resent this type of abusive statement. I work very hard for you and always with a two-fold purpose: to do the best for you artistically and financially. When I book you at the Jean Cocteau Repertory Theatre [Something Cloudy, Something Clear] or allow you to sign for a small film such as THE STRANGEST KIND OF ROMANCE, it isn’t for the money—it’s for the artistic merit and for the possibilities of getting a work done that otherwise might not be done, with the hope of future financial rewards. I’m sorry, but your plays since IGUANA haven’t done well financially and you aren’t an easy sale commercially. I try to offset the not-for-profit situations, since you often cry, “I’m not a wealthy man,” with sales like that of STREETCAR to the movies. . . .

  Yes, Tennessee, let’s level with each other. You wrote recently of Audrey Wood saying theatre people are often impossible people and that you were never an easy client for Audrey even from the beginning. Well let me confirm something I think you already know—You aren’t an easy client now. You’re inconsistent, unreliable, you make commitments you don’t honor and your attitude and approach are often less than gentlemanly. . . .

  . . . You attack me in Chicago because ICM didn’t send you a birthday telegram. I reply, “But Tennessee, I came.” “Well, baby we all come sometime if we’re lucky!” Or in Orlando, “I want my wine in an opaque glass. Mitch, do you know how to spell opaque?” I have a duty to you, but it doesn’t include being abused by you. . . .

  Also in your recent comments about Audrey you said that Audrey understood. I think I understand too, Tennessee. We come from the same area, have the same background (good lord, we even have the same birthday), and like you I’ve worked hard to attain my position as a skilled professional. . . . You are our greatest American playwright, living or dead, and it’s a honor for me to be associated with you. . . . But I must also tell you, dear Tennessee, that I don’t intend to have my first heart attack because of you.

  Williams dismissed “Bitch Douglas” gently but immediately. “I wish you luck and I do believe that you wish me the same,” he wrote, adding, in a reference to the last ICM agent he’d fired, “I know that you’d never draw back your hand and make a hissing sound if I pass your table at the Algonquin.” To Milton Goldman, the head of the agency’s theater division, Williams wrote, “Can you place me in the hands of some agent at ICM who is not and never was one of ‘Miss Wood’s’ people!?” From then on, Goldman, who represented actors, fronted as Williams’s agent while Douglas did the work. “I will not again open an envelope with his name on it,” Williams wrote to Goldman, adding, “What most concerns me is that if Mitch does not do the graceful and dignified thing (for me and ICM) he will still have his hand in my affairs when I split the scene which I think is not long away.”

  IN HIS REVIEW of Clothes for a Summer Hotel, Harold Clurman argued that Williams’s creative practice had become disconnected from his inner self. On the contrary, the apparitions, the shadowy reality, the double exposures of past speaking to present and present to past that dominate Williams’s thin late plays dramatize precisely the retreat of his attenuated self—a self that had been desiccated by his adamantine will to write. The activity that had given him life also gave him death. “There are periods in life when I think that I want death, despite my long struggle against it all these years,” Williams wrote to Oliver Evans at the beginning of 1981. Edwina Williams died in June 1980. (Gore Vidal referred to her as “666” in his condolence note; “that stands for ‘The Beast of the Apocalypse,’ ” Williams explained to Kazan.) Audrey Wood, who had been a kind of surrogate mother for thirty-one years, had a stroke in 1981 and never regained consciousness. Williams sent one of his paintings—Christ on a Cross—to Wood’s nursing home, where it hung over her bed for the four years she clung to life. Williams saw “a long, long stretch of desolation about me, now at the end.” Even his handwriting signaled a shift; the bold flow of his signature was suddenly feathery, no longer an assertion of energy and confidence. “When I am very ill, as I am now—diseased pancreas and liver—I am unable to carry out even the most important things that I should do,” he told Evans at the beginning of 1981, adding, “It is only good to think back on the times when life was lovely—at least comparatively.”

  Williams’s painting of the Crucifixion

  Williams’s memory plays were written in this wistful vein; blending elegance and anxiety, they failed to make his turbulent hauntedness dynamic. “There’s an e
xplosive center to ‘Something Cloudy, Something Clear’—if only Mr. Williams would light the fuse,” Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times. In his final full-length play, A House Not Meant to Stand: A Gothic Comedy, a “spook sonata” that was almost giddy with bleakness, however, Williams lit the fuse and turned his sense of being a “still living remnant” into something savage and sensational.

  “Never, never, never stop laughing!” Williams counseled Truman Capote, during his “period of disequilibrium.” Williams practiced what he preached. Developed in three versions at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago between 1980 and 1982—it began as the one-act Some Problems for the Moose Lodge—A House Not Meant to Stand was a complete stylistic departure. In its embrace of the comic grotesque, it announced Williams’s refusal to suffer. The play’s aspiration—to combine stage mayhem with moral outrage—also broadcast the influence of the British playwright Joe Orton, to whom Williams dedicated The Everlasting Ticket, a play he worked on during the eighteen-month gestation of A House Not Meant to Stand. “I don’t compete with Joe Orton. I love him too much,” Williams said at the time. Nonetheless, he adapted Orton’s game of dereliction, delirium, and denial into his own allegory of decay.

  At curtain rise, the decrepit Cornelius and Bella McCorkle are returning, at midnight, to their dilapidated, rain-swept Mississippi house, which has a perpetually leaky roof and a threadbare interior, whose “panicky disarray” is intended “to produce a shock of disbelief.” The first sound of the play is “a large mantel clock,” which “ticks rather loudly for about half a minute before there is the sound of persons about to enter the house.” The relentlessness of time is the issue. The imminent threat of structural collapse is meant as “a metaphor for the state of society,” Williams says in the play’s first stage direction. (The epigram, by Yeats, is equally explicit: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”) In its loquacious Southern way, the play aspires to a kind of farce momentum: at a certain speed all things disintegrate. But as Williams’s alternative titles for the play indicate—“A House Not Meant to Last Longer Than the Owner,” “The Disposition of the Remains,” “Terrible Details,” “Putting Them Away”—he was also prefiguring his own ending. The play talks about the specter of “sinister times”—nuclear war, inflation, overpopulation—but the haunting it demonstrates is Williams’s.

  A House Not Meant to Stand is a funhouse of mirrors in which comic images of Williams’s humiliated past distort his fury and reflect back his pain as pleasure. Williams’s ornery, bombastic father, CC, returns, under his own name, as the comic menace, Cornelius. Although he has acquired new illnesses (osteoarthritis, pancreatitis) and new pills (Cotazym, Donnatal) from his author, his overstuffed chair and his brutish detachment from his family are very much his own. “I don’t respect tears in a man, and over-attachment to Mom, Mom, Mom,” Cornelius tells his feckless, second son, Charlie. In the play, as in Williams’s life, Cornelius’s hectoring has already driven two children out of the house: Chips, the gay and now dead first son, and Joanie, the daughter, the unseen resident of a lunatic asylum. CC referred to the young Williams as “Miss Nancy.” Cornelius similarly taunts Chips’s effeminacy—“I remember when he was voted the prettiest girl at Pascagoula High.” At the opening, returning from Chips’s funeral, Cornelius and Bella try to understand their son’s tragic early death; Cornelius puts Chips’s homosexuality down to Bella’s cosseting:

  In rehearsal for his last full-length play, A House Not Meant to Stand, 1981

  CORNELIUS: You encouraged it, Bella. Encouraged him to design girls’ dresses. He put a yellow wig on and modelled ’em himself. Something—drag they call it. Misunderstood correctly—by the neighbors.

  BELLA: He could of grown outa that.

  CC threatened to kick Edwina and her children out of the family home; in A House Not Meant to Stand, Cornelius threatens to commit Bella to a mental home in order to get his hands on her “moonshine money,” the cash he thinks his wife has inherited from her bootlegging grandfather and stashed away. (She has.) In a plot point that Williams adapted from his own brother’s folly, Cornelius decides to make a run for Congress and wants the money from Bella to pay for his campaign—the very skulduggery that Williams feared Dakin had become involved in when newspapers reported that Edwina had made a fifty-thousand-dollar contribution to his ill-fated Illinois senatorial bid. (“No one whom I have discussed the question with has any doubt that he will be defeated in this race,” Williams wrote to his mother in 1972. “Please assure me that you have not thrown so much money away on such a hopeless cause.”) Williams wickedly transforms the incident into the driving force of his comedy: Will Cornelius get his hands on the “Dancie money”? Will the confused Bella manage to hang on to it?

  Helping brother Dakin Williams run for governor of Illinois, 1978

  But the real autobiographical revelation of the play is the psychic atmosphere beneath it. Bella’s confounding maternal non-communication is a re-creation of the emotional absenteeism in Edwina that triggered her son’s compulsion to be seen, to turn his inner life into unforgettable event. Cornelius tells Charlie that “lunacy runs rampant” in his wife’s family, the neurasthenic “Dancies” (a variation on “the Dakins”)—just as CC used to berate Edwina’s ancestral line, which was filled with “alarming incidences of mental and nervous breakdowns.” Moving heavily around the house, confused and demented by grief at the loss of her eldest child, Bella is a sort of saintly sleepwalker, whose mind is always elsewhere:

  CHARLIE: Mom?

  BELLA:—Chips?

  CHARLIE: No, no, Mom, I’m Charlie.

  “Bella should be presented as a grotesque but heart-breaking Pieta,” Williams wrote in his notes. “She all but senselessly broods over the play as an abstraction of human love and compassion—and tragedy.” Retreating into herself, projected backward into the past and never alive to her present, she is haunted, and haunting. “My eyes keep clouding over with—time,” she says at one point. When she pokes around the kitchen, Charlie asks her what she’s looking for. “Life, all the life we had here!” she says. Bella pines for her children as they once were; she can’t think of them as adults. Bella is shown as a dutiful wife and mother. Unbidden she serves up an omelette to her son; she insists on doing the shopping; she responds without complaint to her husband’s imperious commands:

  CORNELIUS: (half-rising and freezing in position) TYLENOL THREE. TYLENOL THREE!

  (Automatically Bella crosses to him and removes the medication from his jacket pocket.)

  CORNELIUS: Beer to wash it down with.

  BELLA: Beer . . .

  (She shuffles ponderously off by the dining room.)

  Her actions appear nurturing; her aggression—her refusal to take in her children—is harder to see. At one point, Bella admits to her neighbor, Jessie, that “Little Joanie” is in the state lunatic asylum. “How did this happen to Joanie?” Jessie asks. “I don’t know,” Bella says. Joanie has sent a letter. Bella’s first instinct is not to face it, to have Jessie read it for her. In the end, Bella reads it aloud, an exercise that demonstrates to the audience, if not to Bella, that hearing is not understanding: “All I had was a little nervous break down after that sonovabitch I lived with in Jefferson Parish quit me and went back to his fucking wife.” Bella stops to apologize, and offers her only insight: “She seems to have picked up some very bad langwidge somehow.” A hilarious, subtle piece of invention, the letter is a testament to the family’s climate of denial. Bella can’t fathom the landscape of impoverishment that Joanie’s language betrays. She has loved her children but has not connected to them. She frets about them, but she has never known them or understood her own contribution to their haplessness.

  As Bella approaches her end, in a reversal of the trope of The Glass Menagerie, where, in an exhibition of his literary aplomb, Tom at the finale silences the ghosts of his past (“Blow out your candles, Laura—and so good-bye”), Bella now summons up her own specters. According to the
stage directions, “Ghostly outcries of children fade in—in Bella’s memory—projected over house speakers with music under. She moves with slow, stately dignity.” The children’s voices bring with them the “enchanting lost lyricism of childhood”:

  VOICE OF YOUNG CHIPS:—Dark!

  VOICE OF YOUNG CHARLIE: Mommy!

  VOICE OF YOUNG JOANIE: We’re Hungry!

  At the moment that Bella delivers the Dancie money into safe hands, the ghosts of her children gather around the kitchen table. “Chips—will you say—Grace,” she says. The line echoes Amanda’s first words in The Glass Menagerie: “We can’t say grace until you come to the table!” Amanda’s prayer for grace is answered, at the finale, by Tom’s empowered survival. In Williams’s final full-length play, thirty-seven years later, however, grace is only a memory. “Ceremonially the ghost children rise from the table and slip soundlessly into the dark,” the stage directions say. At the last beat, each ghost turns at the kitchen door “to glance back at their mother. A phrase of music is heard.” The ghosts’ departure brings the curtain down on Bella’s struggle; it also hints at Williams’s sense of an ending: a farewell to lyricism and to the spectral absences that have tormented and inspired him since childhood. With their stately exit, Williams seemed to imply, consciously or not, that he had said all he had to say.