by John Lahr
508 “without my knowledge or authorization”: Williams to Dakin Williams, Feb. 4, 1970, LLC.
508 “at best, he’s pitiable”: Williams to Jo Mielziner, Mar. 20, 1971, Harvard.
508 “Nobody knows the true desolation”: Ibid. Williams’s disenchantment with “the Charming Irishman,” as he began to refer to Glavin in letters, was compounded in February 1970 when Glavin didn’t come to Williams’s aid in an unprovoked bar fight during which Williams was thrown against a wall and the right side of his head was badly bruised. “A vicious-looking ape of a man at a bar began glaring at me. He got up and said, ‘Will you step outside?’ I said: ‘Why not?’ and followed him out,” Williams explained to Wood. “Glavin remained in the bar, sitting, until two strangers drove the man away from me. They then took me home.” Williams added, “He is not only a con-man of the first water, but a dangerous one, and one that is clever as the ‘Heathen Chinee.’ ” (Williams to Audrey Wood, Feb. 1970, HRC.)
508 “Tennessee wanted out”: JLI with Dotson Rader, 2013, JLC.
508 “most of the stuff”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Nov. 4, 1969, LLC.
508 “Dear, dear Tenn”: Audrey Wood to Williams, Nov. 9, 1969, HRC.
508 “On to the future”: Ibid.
CHAPTER 9: THE LONG FAREWELL
509 “Time betrays us”: LOA1, p. 809.
509 “was choppy as hell”: George Keathley, unpublished Ms., JLC.
509 “Tennessee had been obstreperous”: Ibid.
509 “sort of like Sister Elizabeth”: Williams to Cheryl Crawford and Paul Bigelow, May 29, 1971, Columbia.
509 “petrified”: Williams to Oliver Evans, May 21, 1971, LLC.
510 “It’s a cold world without you”: Williams to Lady St. Just, Dec. 2, 1970, FOA, p. 221.
510 “The results were awful”: Keathley, unpublished Ms., JLC.
511 “He could not respond”: Ibid.
511 “We should not again make the mistake”: Audrey Wood to Williams, Nov. 11, 1970, LLC.
511 “In one of our arguments”: Keathley, unpublished Ms., JLC.
511 “Did you notice how Audrey was?”: FOA, p. 231.
511 “an uncanny sense”: NSE, p.132.
511 “Tennessee, I have a thought”: Keathley, unpublished Ms., JLC.
512 “will to manage”: NSE, p. 131.
512 “too much domination”: Ibid.
512 “Now Williams whirled on her”: Keathley, unpublished Ms., JLC.
512 “I became a sort of madman”: M, p. 228.
512 “quiet ferocity”: Ibid.
512 screaming hysterically: Williams acknowledged as much to St. Just a few weeks later, when he recounted another outburst, which he referred to as “one of my really apocalyptic rages the sort usually reserved for ‘the Widow’ [Wood].” (Williams to Lady St. Just, July 23, 1971, FOA, p. 232.)
512 “And you, you bitch”: Keathley, unpublished Ms., JLC.
512 “No one knew what to say”: Ibid.
512 “For the first time in all our years together”: RBAW, p. 200.
512 “to get the hell out of there”: Ibid.
512 “That bitch!”: Ibid.
512 “After such a trauma”: Ibid.
513 “I have been through similar Williams scenes”: Ibid., pp. 200–201.
513 “ ‘Don’t come’ ”: JLI with Alan U. Schwartz, 2009, JLC.
513 “Dear, dear Maria”: Audrey Wood to Maria St. Just, Aug. 6, 1963, Columbia. Wood was proprietary about Williams and quick to scuttle loose talk about any rift. To the New York Daily News’s columnist Charles McHarry, who alleged in an item that her relationship with Williams’s might “be over,” she wrote, “I don’t know where you picked up this bit of misinformation, but I am happy to say that Mr. Williams and I have been working together since 1937 and the relationship has continued for all these years through eleven full-length plays. It would be fine one day if you would run a correction, if you please.” (Audrey Wood to Charles McHarry, Mar. 19, 1962, HRC.)
513 “DEAREST AUDREY”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Mar. 28, 1963, HRC.
514 “Tenn’s defection”: James Laughlin to Audrey Wood, Aug. 21, 1971, HRC.
514 “I wonder what part”: James Laughlin to Audrey Wood, Oct. 1, 1971, HRC.
514 “I don’t believe”: Dotson Rader, Tennessee: Cry of the Heart (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1985), p. 42. Rader adds in a letter, “Peter Glenville, who directed ‘Out Cry’ on Broadway in 1973, told me that Maria was the one behind the sacking of Audrey. Milton Goldman, the head of theatre department of ICM, agreed with that assessment.” (Dotson Rader to John Lahr, Oct. 1, 1971, JLC.)
514 “she could share”: Williams to Ardis Blackburn and Oliver Evans, July 26, 1971, LLC.
514 “I find myself thinking of you”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Mar. 1970, HRC.
514 “I had stupidly feared”: Williams to Lady St. Just, Mar. 16, 1970, FOA, p. 199.
515 It had gone undelivered: FOA, p. 198.
515 unavailable to Williams: “You haven’t heard from me by mail in any detail primarily because each time you have written me you have indicated you were going on to another address and when you gave your next stop there was no reference to any hotel or how I can reach you. So please understand it has not been negligence on my part,” Wood wrote to Williams. (Audrey Wood to Williams, Nov. 11, 1970, HRC.)
515 “little faith left in my own judgment”: Williams to Audrey Wood, July 1970, LLC.
515 “My agent Audrey Wood”: CWTW, p. 190.
515 “You have written a poem of extreme”: Williams to Lady St. Just, May 31, 1971, FOA, p. 227.
515 “TENNESSEE WILLIAMS UNFAIR TO HIS BROTHER”: JLI with Dotson Rader, 2013, JLC.
515 “I’ll never understand”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Sept. 25, 1970, LLC.
515 “in on the conspiracy”: Williams to Lady St. Just, Nov. 9, 1970, FOA, p. 218.
515 “I have a suspicion”: Williams to Audrey Wood, May 26, 1970, HRC.
515 “Once she got the inkling”: John Lahr, “The Lady and Tennessee,” The New Yorker, Dec. 19, 1994, p. 85.
515 “Obviously Audrey has a pair of wire clippers”: Lady St. Just to Williams, Aug. 1, 1970, FOA, p. 206.
515 “amitié amoureuse”: FOA, p. 7.
516 “Remember me as one of your clients”: Williams to Audrey Wood, July 7, 1970, LLC.
516 “I knocked Audrey’s little hat”: Williams to Lady St. Just, Aug. 14, 1970, FOA, p. 206.
516 “DO NOT BE CONCERNED”: Williams to Frank Roberts, Aug. 25, 1970, Columbia.
516 “a forsaken creature”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Sept. 25, 1970, LLC.
516 “It appears for all practical purposes”: Williams to Lady St. Just, Sept. 29, 1970, FOA, p. 209.
516 “Naturally, I never took the fifteen percent”: FOA, p. 211.
516 “one of her Old Testament furies”: Williams to Lady St. Just, Sept. 24, 1970, ibid., p. 208.
517 “Somehow we must circumvent”: Williams to Lady St. Just, Jan. 15, 1971, ibid., p. 222.
517 “by hook or crook”: Williams to Audrey Wood, July 7, 1970, HRC.
517 “for the 94th time”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Nov. 11, 1970, HRC.
517 “I would like you to act”: Williams to Alan U. Schwartz, Jan. 27, 1971, LLC.
517 “Audrey informed me on the phone”: Ibid.
517 “He is an ethical idiot”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Oct. 2, 1970, LLC.
517 “Why didn’t anyone tell me?”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Oct. 2, 1970, HRC.
518 “Tennessee was adamant”: Rader, Tennessee, p. 74.
518 “To quote a line now deleted”: Williams to Audrey Wood, undated (ca. July 1971), HRC.
519 “a temporary holding action”: JLI with Dotson Rader, 2012, JLC. “I had a rather turbulent break-up with Audrey Wood in Chicago,” Williams wrote to his mother. “This had been developing for a long time, at least ten years, as she has not been helping at all. Now I have a new agent who is much more attentive to my
professional matters and also much more agreeable.” (Williams to Edwina Williams, Nov. 5, 1971, LLC.)
519 “Then something happened”: RBAW, p. 202.
519 “There was no way”: JLI with Arthur Kopit, 2012, JLC.
519 “She was way more than an agent”: Ibid.
519 “weird tribe”: David Lobdell to Patricia Lobdell Hepplewhite, Dec. 6, 1970, LLC.
520 “There is much about her”: NSE, p. 131.
520 obligation to be great: “My need for success is different now. It’s really more a case of acceptance than success. I don’t even think anything I do is a masterpiece anymore. You either get by with it or you don’t.” Craig Zadan, “Tennessee Williams: The Revitalization of a Great Dramatist,” Show, May 1972.
520 “She found it quite easy”: Williams to Floria Lasky, Sept. 5, 1971, LLC.
520 “the Dixie Buzz Bomb”: Williams to unknown, Oct. 1972, THNOC.
520 “I feel that since we’ve met”: Williams to Bill Barnes, Apr. 14, 1971, THNOC.
520 “He is a thoroughly dangerous”: Charles Bowden to Lady St. Just, May 21, 1972, HRC.
520 “I need the fact”: Williams to Bill Barnes, Apr. 14, 1971, THNOC.
520 “boiling with something”: Williams to Floria Lasky, Sept. 5, 1971, LLC.
520 “I am making a number of changes”: Ibid.
521 “just this side of final”: Williams to William Hunt, Dec. 24, 1971, LLC.
521 “minor”: Williams to James Laughlin, ca. July 1972, LLC.
521 “I have no intention”: Williams to William Hunt, Dec. 24, 1971, LLC.
521 “The thing you mustn’t lose in life”: Mel Gussow, “Williams Looking to Play’s Opening,” New York Times, Mar. 31, 1972.
521 “it repeats the mood and mode”: Harold Clurman, “Small Craft Warnings,” Nation, Apr. 24, 1972.
521 “I don’t want to be involved”: CWTW, p. 146.
521 “not a person dedicated”: Ibid., p. 132.
521 “Young people were the world”: John Weisman, “Sweet Bird of Youth at 60,” Detroit Free Press, Feb. 20, 1972.
522 “the only thing at this point in my life”: Williams to William Hunt, Dec. 24, 1971, LLC.
522 “I am too ornery”: Williams to Dotson Rader, Aug. 2, 1971, Columbia.
522 “indispensable”: Ibid.
522 “You gave me charm”: Williams to Dotson Rader, Dec. 21, 1972, Columbia.
523 “We both seemed much older”: Rader, Tennessee, p. 23.
523 “I want to meet your underground friends”: Williams to Dotson Rader, Aug. 2, 1971, Columbia.
523 “How liberating that was!”: JLI with Dotson Rader, 2012, JLC.
523 “In a night, we’d go to dinner”: Ibid.
523 “Being places where respectable people”: Rader, Tennessee, p. 9.
523 “For you . . . being part”: Williams to Dotson Rader, undated, Columbia.
524 “was the fact that young people”: Rader, Tennessee, p. 85.
524 “My bringing Tennessee”: JLI with Dotson Rader, 2012, JLC.
524 “drifting almost willfully”: NSE, p. 165.
525 “pure revolutionaries”: Williams to Dotson Rader, undated, Columbia.
525 Williams chose Fire Island: Williams to Dotson Rader, Aug. 12, 1972, Columbia.
525 “It is impossible to overstate”: JLI with Dotson Rader, 2012, JLC.
525 “It becomes very easy”: Williams to Dotson Rader, undated, Columbia.
526 “to subvert the media image of protesters”: Dotson Rader to John Lahr, June 29, 1971, JLC.
526 “I must be rehabilitated”: Williams to Dotson Rader, undated, Columbia.
526 “pig-dom”: Tennessee Williams, “We Are Dissenters Now,” Harper’s Bazaar, Jan. 1972.
527 “IF WE DO NOT ACT”: Dotson Rader to Williams, undated, Columbia.
527 “I am certainly in favor”: Williams to William Hunt, Nov. 23, 1971, LLC.
527 “I am too old to march anymore”: Dotson Rader, Blood Dues (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), p. 97.
527 “Suddenly ‘The Movement’ was unmasked”: “Statement to be Presented to Knopf Publishers” (relating to Rader’s Blood Dues), Oct. 1, 1972, LLC.
527 “probably the most shocking”: Williams to Dotson Rader, Dec. 21, 1972, Columbia.
528 “I avoided all affiliations”: Ibid. Williams wrote this in response to Rader’s “The Day the Movement Died,” Esquire, Dec. 1972.
528 “to be conducted by my revolutionary comrades”: Williams, “Last Will and Testament,” June 21, 1972, LLC.
528 “this ambience of continual dreadfulness”: Williams to Dotson Rader, July 16, 1972, Columbia.
528 “I was thinking last night”: Ibid.
528 “a quality of sexlessness”: LOA2, p. 727.
528 “the finest writing I’ve done”: William Glover, “Interview with Tennessee Williams: Playwright Subdues His Demons,” Associated Press, June 16, 1972.
528 “QUENTIN: . . . There’s a coarseness”: LOA2, p. 744.
529 “can do no harm”: Williams to Bill Barnes, Jan. 1, 1972, LLC. During rehearsals, Williams ran into Gore Vidal at the bar of the Plaza Hotel. “He assured me that it was no longer possible for me to get good notices on a play because of all ‘the awful personal publicity,’ ” Williams wrote to Oliver Evans, adding, “Gore’s invidious attitude toward other writers has become a real sickness. And I am sick of it.” (Williams to Oliver Evans, Mar. 23, 1972, LLC.)
529 “I certainly had no desire”: Tennessee Williams, Moise and the World of Reason (London: Brilliance Books, 1984), p. 42.
530 “metaphor for posterity”: Williams to Bill Barnes, Jan. 9, 1972, THNOC.
530 “They’ll say the Resurrection”: Mel Gussow, “Williams Looking to Play’s Opening,” New York Times, Mar. 31, 1972.
530 “The critics in New York”: Williams to Lady St. Just, Apr. 14, 1972, FOA, p. 256.
530 “The Revitalization of a Great Dramatist”: Zadan, “Tennessee Williams.”
530 “may survive better than some”: Clive Barnes, “Williams Accepting Life As Is,” New York Times, Apr. 3, 1972.
530 “a five-finger exercise”: Ted Kalem, “Clinging to a Spar,” Time, Apr. 17, 1972.
530 “Surely you meant”: Williams to Ted Kalem, Apr. 27, 1972, HRC.
530 “Goddam it, no”: Williams to Lady St. Just, June 9, 1972, FOA, p. 263.
530 “A star is born”: Ibid.
530 “He never shut up”: JLI with Peg Murray, 2012, JLC. Murray also starred in A House Not Meant to Stand and A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur.
531 “Just watch his lips”: Ibid.
531 “he was wonderful in the part”: Ibid.
531 “a pair of jerks imitating”: Williams to Lady St. Just, Sept. 18, 1972, FOA, p. 272.
531 “A synonym for a manager”: Ibid.
532 “Not as bad as they’ll go”: Williams to Oliver Evans, Sept. 20, 1972, Harvard.
532 “We were all terrified”: JLI with Peg Murray, 2012, JLC.
532 “I was belting out every line”: Williams to Oliver Evans, Sept. 20, 1972, Harvard.
532 “Tennessee, look”: “An Open Letter to Tennessee Williams,” by Mike Silverstein, as quoted in Kaila Jay and Allen Young, eds., Out of the Closet: Voices of Gay Liberation (New York: New York University Press, 1992), p. 69.
532 “the ‘freed’ generation”: Lee Barton, “Why Do Homosexual Playwrights Hide Their Homosexuality?,” New York Times, Jan. 23, 1972.
533 “I feel sorry for the author”: Arthur Bell, “Tennessee Williams: ‘I’ve Never Faked It,’ ” Village Voice, Feb. 24, 1972.
533 Gay Sunshine review of Williams’s Memoirs: Andrew Dvosin, “Outcast as Success,” Gay Sunshine, Summer/Fall 1976.
533 “shocking misapprehension of my work”: Tennessee Williams, “A Reply to a Review,” Gay Sunshine, Winter 1977.
533 “founding father”: Ibid.
533 “Now, surely, Mr. Dvosin”: Ibid.
534 “There are a
great many people in this town”: David Lobdell to Patricia Lobdell Hepplewhite, Dec. 6, 1970, LLC.
534 “Certain people on the streets”: Ibid.
534 “My name is Tennessee Williams!”: Rader, Tennessee, p. 194.
534 Williams had stood his ground: On the Key West police blotter for Jan. 28, 1979, Williams is quoted as saying, “They were just punks. It happened quickly. There was no injury sustained. A lens fell out of my glasses.” Asked later, why the attack hadn’t bothered him, he said, “Because, baby, I don’t allow it to.” (See N, p. 742.)
534 “to whom my heart is committed”: Williams, Moise, p. 139.
534 “relentless thing called time”: Williams to Bill Barnes, Jan. 1, 1972, THNOC.
534 “I feel so OLD”: William A. Raidy, St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Apr. 15, 1972.
534 “At sixty-one”: CWTW, p. 219.
535 “Time had interred his looks”: Truman Capote, Answered Prayers (London: Penguin Books, 1988), p. 59.
535 “Perhaps I’ll have a face-lift”: N, “Mes Cahiers Noirs,” Spring 1979, p. 737.
535 “eye-lift”: Ibid. In 1978, at the suggestion of “Texas” Kate Moldawer, Williams had cosmetic surgery.
535 “an aging man’s almost continual scuttling”: M, p. xviii.
535 “My best work was always done”: CWTW, p. 220.
535 “the charm of the Orientals”: Williams to Oliver Evans, Oct. 18, 1972, Harvard.
535 “I was comforted greatly”: Williams to Edmund Perret, Sept. 20, 1972, THNOC. Perret, who was from an aristocratic New Orleans family, graduated from St. John Fisher College, then got his MA at Duquesne University. At Brown University and Catholic University he did doctoral studies. He became an executive director of the Contact Lens Association of Ophthalmologists. He met Williams in 1972, while still a student, and became a close friend. “I always thought if he and I had been born in the same year or a few years apart it would have been the greatest gay love affair that ever existed. He knew that. That’s why he said, ‘Baby, we missed the boat,’ ” Perret told Lyle Leverich in a 1983 interview. “He was my platonic lover. It was never consummated.”
535 “Robert was very, very, very quiet”: JLI with Dotson Rader, 2012, JLC.
535 “He drives well”: Williams to Oliver Evans, Oct. 18, 1972, Harvard.
536 “he alternates in moods”: Williams to Bill Barnes, May 31, 1973, THNOC.
