by John Lahr
474 “He calls me”: Ibid.
474 “To believe in pills”: Williams to Paul Bowles, Sept. 18, 1964, LLC.
474 “Tom came here to dinner”: Paula Laurence to Marion Vaccaro, Sept. 17, 1964, LLC.
475 “I am going into rehearsal”: Williams to Lady St. Just, Jan. 20, 1965, FOA, p. 190.
475 lost his audience: “I don’t have an audience, you see. I had one once, but I lost it in the 60’s.” Williams, Topeka Daily Capital, Sept. 10, 1971.
475 “We are not soft people”: Williams to Mary Hunter, Apr. 1943, L1, p. 439.
475 “matriculating in a school for the blind”: LOA1, p. 400.
476 “We are on the verge of Armageddon”: Harold Clurman, “The New Drama,” Nation, Jan. 16, 1967.
476 “thrilling alienation”: Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (London: Methuen, 1999), p. 542.
476 “Once again we were looking almost completely”: Ibid.
476 “The new theatre is lunging”: Stefan Kanfer, “White Dwarf’s Tragic Fade-Out,” Life, June 13, 1969.
476 “The permission that Williams helped create”: JLI with Tony Kushner, 2011, JLC.
477 “Why pick on me?”: Geoffrey Wansell, Terence Rattigan: A Biography (London: Oberon Books, 2009), p. 365.
477 “the Broadway audience has changed”: Robert Brustein, “A Question of Identity,” New Republic, Mar. 16, 1966.
477 “fits people and societies going a bit mad”: CWTW, p. 218.
477 “It’s harder as you get older”: Ibid., p. 120.
478 “I decided they were right”: Ibid., p. 157.
478 “Everything’s southernmost here”: Tennessee Williams, The Gnadiges Fraulein (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1967), p. 6.
478 “You’d go a long way out of your way”: Ibid., p. 10.
478 “with Caribbean blue eyes”: Ibid., p. 4.
479 “POLLY: HOW”: Ibid., p. 20.
479 Cubist parody of Southern Gothic: Williams called the play “a gothic comedy.”
479 “Picasso designed it”: Williams, Gnadiges Fraulein, p. 4.
479 symbolic triumph of the pratfall: “We’d enter a restaurant and before Tenn had had even one drink, he’d fall down,” Maureen Stapleton recalled. “After a while he was always falling down.” (Spoto, Kindness, p. 264.)
479 “gunfire dialogue”: CWTW, p. 98.
479 blind in one eye: Alleane Hale, “The Gnadiges Fraulein: Tennessee Williams’s Clown Show,” in Philip C. Kolin, ed., The Undiscovered Country: The Later Plays of Tennessee Williams (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), p. 43.
479 “would not be out of place”: Williams, Gnadiges Fraulein, p. 13.
479 “Her scroll has been charged”: Ibid., p. 12.
479 “Having passed and long passed the zenith”: Ibid., p. 18.
480 “Three fish a day”: Ibid., p. 19.
480 “the competish”: Ibid., p. 20.
480 “assumes the starting position”: Ibid., p. 35.
480 “The Disunited Mistakes”: Ibid., p. 5.
480 “incomprehensible evil”: Spoto, Kindness, p. 265.
480 “didn’t have a clue”: Zoe Caldwell, I Will Be Cleopatra: An Actress’s Journey (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), p. 190.
480 Schneider confessed as much: Hale, “Gnadiges Fraulein,” p. 42.
480 “who followed the printed script”: Mike Steen, A Look at Tennessee Williams (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1969), p. 70.
480 “I had my arm in a sling”: Ibid.
481 “I doubt the audience will see”: Caldwell, I Will Be Cleopatra, p. 190. Caldwell also writes, “Three years later, in 1969, I went to Key West and there were the little gray clapboard houses blown at a slant by the gulf winds with two weathered rocking chairs on the veranda. There were the pelicans down at the dock competing for fish. There were hippies dressed as Indians, and the sailors still had those tight bums. And inside the bars, there were quite a few leftover ladies with dyed hair, red lips, bright eye shadow, and shoes that belong to another time or someone else—and, because of the heat, a lot of white powder was caked on their faces. Sad clowns. I realized that, like all great artists, Tennessee didn’t write lies. . . . Artists make us stop and look.”
482 “marvelous”: Steen, Look, p. 120.
482 “The press hit me with all the ammo”: M, p. 212.
482 “A brilliant talent is sleeping”: Stanley Kauffmann, “Tennessee Williams Returns,” New York Times, Feb. 23, 1966.
482 “savage slapstick”: Walter Kerr, “Kerr Reviews Two by Tennessee Williams,” New York Herald Tribune, Feb. 23, 1966.
482 “Walter Kerr dismissed ‘Gnadiges Fraulein’ ”: CWTW, p. 235.
482 “they might have gained considerable esteem”: Harold Clurman, “Slapstick Tragedy,” Nation, Mar. 14, 1966.
482 derisory reviews: “Pointless, pompous nightmare” (Newsweek); “an ordeal of tedium” (Hollywood Reporter); “pretentious . . . ludicrous. Why was ‘Boom!’ ever filmed in the first place?” (Los Angeles Herald-Examiner). Quoted in Harry Medved and Michael Medved, The Hollywood Hall of Shame: The Most Expensive Flops in Movie History (New York: Perigee Books, 1984), p. 109.
482 “I want to die”: RBAW, p. 192.
482 “I would fall down often”: M, p. 211.
483 “I was abandoned by friends”: CWTW, p. 235.
483 “zombie”: M, p. 210.
483 Carson McCullers: “To have known a person of Carson’s spiritual purity and magnitude has been one of the great graces of my life.” (Williams to Virginia Spencer Carr, Aug. 18, 1970, Delaware.)
483 “I did not pick him up”: JLI with John Hancock, 2012, JLC.
483 “He confessed that he’d been furious”: Ibid.
483 “in quite imminent danger”: Murray Schumach, “Tennessee Williams Expresses Fear for Life in Note to Brother,” New York Times, June 29, 1968.
483 “If anything of a violent nature”: Ibid.
483 “Please check up on my son”: Edwina Williams to Marion Vaccaro, Dec. 10, 1968, LLC.
483 “the life bit”: Williams to David Lobdell, Aug. 22, 1965, LLC.
483 “I wrote it”: Courier-Journal and Louisville Times, June 6, 1971.
483 “To play with fear”: Tennessee Williams, The Two-Character Play (New York: New Directions, 1979), p. 2. All quotes from The Two-Character Play are from this edition.
483 “incomplete interior”: Ibid., p. 1.
483 “insane”: Ibid., p. 14.
483 “a play within a play within a play”: Tom Buckley, “Tennessee Williams Survives,” Atlantic Monthly, Nov. 1970, p. 164.
483 “So it’s a prison”: Williams, Two-Character Play, p. 59.
483 “If we can imagine summer”: Ibid.
483 “Do it while you still can!”: Ibid., p. 63.
485 “Mishima told me then”: Williams to Oliver Evans, undated, Harvard.
485 “been ravaged, without Vaseline”: Williams to James Laughlin, Mar. 10, 1968, LLC.
485 “I am in a state of panic”: Williams to David Lobdell, Jan. 1968, LLC.
485 “I don’t believe God is dead”: Williams to Robert MacGregor, Apr. 1968, LLC.
485 “He still is not taking care”: Audrey Wood to Lady St. Just, July 16, 1968, FOA, p. 196.
485 “Everyday I work slowly”: Williams to James Laughlin and Robert MacGregor, July 5, 1968, LLC.
485 “an artist’s one-ness”: Williams to Herbert Machiz, undated, THNOC.
486 “The Negative”: Tennessee Williams, “The Negative” (unpublished poem), undated, Harvard.
486 “the constant unbearable”: “MARK: The constant unbearable of. MIRIAM: Mine! MARK: Mine! . . .” Tennessee Williams, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1969), p. 23.
487 “total collapse of the nervous system”: Ibid., p. 10.
487 “He is mad”: Ibid., p. 30.
487 “adventure”: Ibid., p. 22.
487 “crock”: Ibid., p. 28.
487 “He’s gone throug
h drip”: Ibid., p. 32.
487 finish each other’s sentences: Walter Kerr’s review contended that Williams “made a fetish of the unfinished sentence.” (Walter Kerr, “The Facts Don’t Add Up to Faces,” New York Times, May 25, 1969.) “My incompleted sentences are quite deliberate,” Williams wrote back to Kerr. “I feel they give a quality of urgency to dialogue, even to monologues.” (Williams to Walter Kerr, May 30, 1969, Wisconsin.)
487 “MIRIAM—Are we two people”: Williams, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, p. 24.
487 “MARK: For the first time”: Ibid., p. 14.
488 “I don’t complete many sentences”: CWTW, p. 136.
488 “peculiarly humiliating doom”: Williams to Herbert Machiz, Apr. 29, 1969, THNOC.
488 “but stumbles to his knees”: Williams, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, p. 12.
488 “Too soon after work”: Ibid., p. 15.
488 “shaking, unbathed, unshaved”: Ibid.
488 “demanding what I can’t give”: Ibid., p. 16.
488 “MIRIAM: You’ll return to the States”: Ibid., p. 23.
488 “I’ll tell you something”: Ibid., p. 36.
488 “be back in ten minutes”: Ibid., p. 38.
489 letter to Herbert Machiz: On May 14, 1969, part of the letter was later reproduced in an ad in the New York Times.
489 “As Mark truthfully says”: Williams to Herbert Machiz, May 14, 1969, LLC.
489 “MIRIAM: I have clipped flowers”: Williams, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, p. 23.
490 “I have, under my own name”: Ibid., p. 30.
490 “Miriam appears to see”: Ibid., p. 38.
490 “Released!”: Ibid.
490 “Animation”: Ibid., p. 39.
490 “What are your actual plans?”: Ibid., p. 40.
490 “With abrupt violence”: Ibid.
490 “He thought that he could create”: Ibid.
491 “At this moment”: TWIB, p. 285.
491 “broad hints in person and in print”: Ted Kalem, “The Angel of the Odd,” Time, Mar. 9, 1962.
491 “weakened by the flu”: Miami Herald, Jan. 11, 1969.
491 “I also received the last rites”: Williams to Robert MacGregor, Mar. 9, 1969, LLC. After his conversion, at night in Key West when he’d turn out his reading light, Williams told a friend, “I’d feel the presence of Our Lady sitting by my bed. Sad to think it was only two Doridens and a 100 milligram Mellaril tablet taking effect, I suppose. Mais! Je suis une religieuse loute la meme vraiment dans ma coeur sacre violee.” (Williams to Andrew Lyndon, Nov. 4, 1969, Harvard.)
491 “Salty Author Williams Takes Catholic Vows”: Miami Herald, Jan. 11, 1969.
491 “Dear Father Joe”: Williams to Ruth Guttman, Nov. 7, 1969, Harvard. “My conversion to The Roman Catholic Church was altogether sincere and remains so.”
491 “He didn’t understand”: “Salty Author Williams Takes Catholic Vows,” Miami Herald, Jan. 11, 1969. According to a letter written from the Archdiocese of Miami to the executive director of the Bishop’s Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, Williams’s baptism was a mistake. “Mr. Williams had previously been an Episcopalian and had been baptized. However, he insisted that Father LeRoy, S.J. of Key West baptize him, explaining that he wanted ‘the full spiritual benefit of being received into the Catholic faith.’ Father LeRoy did baptize him conditionally and admits and regrets his mistake. Father LeRoy is new in Key West and in the Archdiocese of Miami and perhaps had not seen the guidelines.” (Rev. James D. Enright to Rev. Bernard F. Law, Feb. 6, 1969, LLC.)
491 “get my goodness back”: TWIB, p. 285.
491 “Tenn thinks his conversion”: Miami Herald, Jan. 18, 1969.
491 “the eventual, unavoidable doom”: Williams to Herbert Machiz, Apr. 2, 1969, THNOC.
492 “He seemed to be interested only in stage movement”: Williams to James Laughlin, May 4, 1969, LLC.
492 “Anne Meacham as Mark’s wife”: Harold Clurman, “Theatre,” Nation, June 2, 1969.
492 “In the age of the heartless avant-garde”: Jack Kroll, “Life Is a Bitch,” Newsweek, May 26, 1969.
492 “almost too personal”: Clive Barnes, “Williams Play Explores Decay of an Artist,” New York Times, May 12, 1969.
492 “more deserving of a coroner’s report”: “New Plays,” Time, May 23, 1969.
492 “Tennessee Williams appears to be”: Stefan Kanfer, “White Dwarf’s Tragic Fade-Out,” Life, June 13, 1969.
492 “Tom, it’s time for you”: M, p. 213.
492 “Whatever the exact price was”: RBAW, p. 197.
492 “Played out?”: New York Times, June 10, 1969.
492 “I really began to crack”: M, p. 216.
493 “I had an evening with very sad Tennessee”: Yukio Mishima to Robert MacGregor, July 3, 1969, HRC.
494 “My condition had so deteriorated”: Williams to Oliver Evans, undated, 1971, LLC.
494 “rollicking nature”: M, p. 210.
494 “an almost suspect glamour”: Ibid., p. 208.
494 “Tennessee always preferred someone”: LLI with William Gray, 1986, LLC.
494 “He didn’t look after him”: LLI with Robert Hines and Jack Fricks, 1986, LLC.
494 “would get Tennessee knocked out”: Ibid.
494 “There’s a limit to what anybody”: LLI with Dakin Williams, 1985, LLC.
494 “elected to be a zombie”: M, p. 210.
495 “shooting up with Dr. Feelgood’s amphetamines”: LLI with Charles Bowden, 1996, LLC.
495 “very attractive to ladies”: M, p. 210.
495 “perhaps . . . closest”: Ibid., p. 208.
495 “During our nearly five years together”: Ibid., p. 210.
495 “Tennessee made impossible demands”: LLI with Dakin Williams, 1988, LLC.
495 “Tennessee, how do you dare live”: M, p. 211.
495 “being a madman”: Ibid.
495 “[Glavin] probably started”: Ibid.
495 “three favorite modern plays”: Williams to William Glavin, ca. Mar. 20, 1971, LLC.
495 “It isn’t so much my life”: Ibid. “It took a high level of desperate delusion to assign Glavin ‘The Dance of Death.’ The idea that he would’ve been able to read it and appreciate it in any way is crazy. He was actually kind of creepy to have around. I never heard Tennessee relate to him in any way about intellectual matters. The Tool Box, yes, Strindberg no.” (John Hancock to John Lahr, May 17, 2012, JLC.)
496 “Old men go mad at night”: CP, “Old Men Go Mad at Night,” p. 85.
497 “He never knew where he was”: TWIB, p. 290.
497 “He insisted someone”: Spoto, Kindness, p. 283.
497 “The rest is not a blur”: Williams to Andrew Lyndon, Nov. 4, 1969, Harvard.
497 “Dakin, an attempt will be made on my life”: “Salty Author Williams Takes Catholic Vows,” Miami Herald, Jan. 11, 1969.
499 “Queeny Towers”: CWTW, p. 173.
499 “I thought Shirley was making”: Spoto, Kindness, p. 283.
499 “thought he was in full control”: LLI with Dakin Williams, 1985, LLC.
499 “a little Prussian officer in drag”: M, p. 219.
499 “There was now, quite clearly”: Ibid.
500 “He told me that I could sign a letter”: LLI with Dakin Williams, 1985, LLC.
500 “by a wheel-chair with straps”: M, p. 220.
500 “fainting as Tennessee was being wheeled”: LLI with Dakin Williams, 1985, LLC.
500 running for the U.S. Senate: Dakin’s campaign poster (in Tennessee Williams Papers at Harvard) read:
DAKIN WILLIAMS FOR U.S. SENATOR
Peace & Love Join GO-DAKE (Gun Owners for America; Stop Abortion Vote Dakin)
500 “Who are you?”: TWIB, p. 293.
500 “It wasn’t voluntary at all”: Williams to Andrew Lyndon, Nov. 10, 1969, Harvard.
501 “a 2 by 4 situation”: LOA1, p. 417.
501 “Where am I?”: LLI with Dakin Wi
lliams, 1985, LLC. Williams disputed the story.
501 “every half hour by an intern”: Williams to William Glavin, undated, LLC.
501 “Spooksville”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Nov. 4, 1969, LLC.
501 “nightmare alley”: Williams to William Glavin, undated, LLC.
501 “Upset the card table”: LLI with Dakin Williams, 1985, LLC.
501 “I am a completely disenfranchised citizen”: Williams to William Glavin, undated, LLC.
501 “convulsive seizures”: Williams to Andreas Brown, Nov. 4, 1969, HRC.
501 seizures escalated to “heart attacks”: CWTW, p. 175.
501 “The circumstances under which I was treated”: Williams to Robert MacGregor, Aug. 19, 1970, Harvard.
502 “De Profundis 200,502”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Nov. 4, 1969, LLC.
502 “I’m afraid I bear him malice”: Williams to Paul Bowles, Dec. 23, 1969, Delaware.
502 “sort of a Quixote”: Williams to Andrew Lyndon, Dec. 7, 1967, LLC.
502 “Brother Cain”: Williams to Andrew Lyndon, Nov. 1969, Harvard.
502 “legalized fratricide”: Williams to Robert MacGregor, Aug. 19, 1970, LLC.
502 “I know that you never intended”: Williams to Dakin Williams, Nov. 11, 1970, LLC.
503 “Redemption from what?”: M, p. 220.
503 “How terribly I’ve abused myself”: Williams to James Laughlin and Robert MacGregor, Nov. 10, 1969, Harvard.
503 “ ‘You say you do not sleep well’ ”: CP, “What’s Next on the Agenda, Mr. Williams?,” p. 152.
504 “was fully aware of who Tennessee was”: LLI with Dakin Williams, 1985, LLC.
505 “The worst may be over”: Williams to William Glavin, undated, LLC.
506 “I was obviously quite ill”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Oct. 29, 1969, HRC.
506 “Today, for the first time”: Ibid.
506 “I’d planned to get a couple of suits”: Williams to David Lobdell, Nov. 12, 1969, LLC.
507 “sprung”: Williams to Andrew Lyndon, Nov. 1969, Harvard.
507 “The prospect of early release”: Ibid.
507 “My mind is quite clear”: Williams to Andrew Lyndon, Nov. 10, 1969, Harvard.
507 “Perhaps that’s for the best”: Williams to Paul Bowles, Dec. 11, 1969, LLC.
507 “to ship Glavin off”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Feb. 1970, LLC.
507 “With his facile Irish charm”: Ibid.
