by Fannie Flagg
“Robert is my clean-up man.”
Dena appeared to be puzzled and he laughed.
“After Mardi Gras they have clean-up men to pick up all the debris off the streets left over from the parade. That’s what I am, just debris left over from some past parade, and if I fall in the streets, Robert picks me up.” He cackled at his own joke.
Dena could tell he was shy with her so she tried to keep it light. “Do you tend to fall down a lot?”
His eyes twinkled. “Miss Nordstrom, I’m down now, but not out. Not quite, not yet this morning, at least. But I cannot vouch for this afternoon.”
The three of them walked down the street, one tall, cool blonde; one short man in a straw Panama hat and sunglasses; and Robert, a medium-sized young man in gray slacks and a maroon jacket. Everyone they passed recognized Williams. They walked over to St. Louis Cathedral and Bienville Square as he provided her with a short history of New Orleans. But Dena was more anxious to talk about him.
“Mr. Williams, I know this is a stupid question, but you are clearly the most famous living playwright in America. How does it feel to be so famous?”
He pointed to St. Peter’s Street, and an upstairs veranda. “That’s where I live. I have just a small place.” He walked her past the old Cornstalk Inn Hotel and showed her the wrought-iron fence that surrounded it. She realized that he might not want to answer her idiotic question.
He pushed his glasses up on his nose and gestured to a restaurant down the street. “Let’s go in the Court of Two Sisters; don’t you love that name?” They walked into a long, dark room leading to the restaurant and the maître d’ was pleased to see him. When they were escorted to a lovely outside courtyard, three waiters came over immediately. He knew them all. Williams and Dena ordered screwdrivers and Robert ordered iced tea. Williams explained to the waiter, “He’s driving,” and giggled. After his drink came he seemed to relax.
“Mr. Williams, getting back to … what we were talking about …” She took out her notebook.
He looked amused. “Oh, yes. You wanted to know about that mean old whore, fame.” He lifted his glass and stared at it.
“Yes.”
“Fame is like a shark with a thousand eyes, waiting to eat you, gobble you up. Eat and swim, eat and swim. Fame kills, baby. Fame is an uneasy place; people are either running toward it or running away from it but it’s not a place where anyone can live comfortably. No one enjoys it.”
“Don’t you think there are some people who like being famous?”
He took a sip of his drink. “I suppose there are some insensitive people out there who don’t mind living their lives out in full public view. But I don’t know of a true artist who can survive or create without some privacy. One must be allowed to break away from the herd and form different ideas. Don’t you agree?”
“Oh, yes,” Dena said, “completely.”
“But there are those determined to destroy privacy, to kill individual thought. Robert thinks I overstate my case but it’s a case that needs to be overstated. There must be privacy, even among the well known.”
“What did you expect being famous would be like, Mr. Williams?”
“I didn’t expect anything. I just wanted to write plays. I was not prepared for fame; nothing prepares you for that, baby. You struggle along for years, unnoticed, then you wake up one day and suddenly everybody in the world wants to meet you. But you soon find out they don’t want to meet you, they want you to meet them. All these pretty boys.” He nodded slightly toward a table full of unusually graceful young men over in the corner, who had been staring at him and whispering. “They don’t want me. It’s a piece of that hot fame they want. It’s shocking, the number of young men who try everything to catch my attention, like male birds strutting around the female, flashing their plumage.” He laughed. “And I do mean flashing. All thinking, mistakenly, of course, if I were to fancy them, they would become stars overnight. They have long ceased to consider that one ingredient called talent. And who can blame them? Look around. It’s the untalented hiring the untalented, all desperate for fame at any cost. But at any cost, the price of fame is too high, baby, way too high.” He raised his hand and a waiter was there. “Two more screwdrivers, please, and bring mine without the orange juice. I wish to donate my orange to some person in need.”
“Mr. Williams, I appreciate your seeing me for this interview.”
He smiled. “I’ve been assured that you were not out to do me harm. I rarely give interviews anymore. Of course, now it really doesn’t matter; they write them anyway.” Their drinks arrived. “I call them the Masturbation Pieces. They do it without me.”
His eyes changed as he began to stare across the courtyard at a brick wall.
“One such interview was particularly disturbing. This person wrote the most atrocious lies about me and some sailor! Afterwards I had young toughs riding by my home in Key West, throwing rocks and calling out the most … well, let’s just say it was a most hurtful and unpleasant experience to be stoned for something out of another’s warped imagination. But what can you do?”
He shuddered. “Today, public life is as unforgiving as heart surgery; one slip, one mistake and you’re dead. Fame for the strong and the invulnerable can be hard, but when one has a secret or a perceived weakness, living in constant fear of public exposure can be devastating; it can kill you, baby. I know, I was literally sick with fear at what certain printed information would do to my family, my mother, my sister, and my worst fears came to pass, of course. But no one is safe now. There are numerous unscrupulous people offering to pay for private information on anyone well known. Every person you have ever come in contact with is a time bomb waiting to explode and do you harm, even strangers who don’t know you.” The waiter replaced his drink. “There’s nothing one can do. People claim to have met me, or slept with me, claim to have been in my home … and that’s while I’m alive, baby. Imagine what will be written after I’m gone.”
Suddenly he seemed sad and put his drink down. “I don’t even know half the people who write those books. But when friends start trafficking in your life for money, it is a wound that will not heal. I am like a dog that has been hit too hard, too often. I don’t trust anything human anymore. I am completely baffled.” He looked at her. “What would cause someone to betray another and speak publicly of private and deeply personal matters? It is the ultimate betrayal, don’t you think?” He looked away. “It sickens me. But it happens every day now. Lovers betray lovers, children betray parents. I once said nothing human disgusts me but I was wrong. This disgusts me—and I am equally disgusted with the writer, the publisher, the so-called journalist, and the public who ultimately buys. No wonder the celebrity becomes deranged and confused. They see on one hand a large group of worshipers, and on the other a large group of people who have nothing but jealousy and contempt for no reason except that you are recognized and they are not. It wasn’t beauty that killed the beast, baby, it was fame.”
“What about your real fans, the genuine admirers of your work?”
“I suppose there are some, of course, but I rarely see them. They are not the kind to push themselves in front of anybody to get to you. I might be in a restaurant and such a person could be at the next table but they are not going to invade my privacy. The kind of people I would like to meet, I don’t, while the others push in front of them, shielding me from the gentle and shy people I would want to speak with.”
Dena felt uneasy. “Mr. Williams, did you ever have an idol?”
“Oh, yes, many, but it would never occur to me to run up and ask for an autograph. It never occurred to me to do anything but appreciate and enjoy their work. Work, baby—that’s what is offered, not his life. Two different things. Now the recognizable are being shot at, sued, or built up by public relations factories to some fevered, frenzied pitch, and when their time is up they are pulled down off their pedestals and eaten alive by interviewers asking rude questions. Oh, it’s worse than feeding
Christians to the lions.… Mercy, I need a little more fortification for this conversation.” He raised his hand and immediately another drink was in it.
Now he seemed cheered. “You know, the Indians wouldn’t let you take their pictures. They thought people were trying to steal their souls. And they were right!” He repeated in a loud voice that could be heard across the room. “The Indians were right!”
“I think we should order some food,” Robert said, and waved at a waiter.
Williams squinted at him, then back at Dena. “Robert is concerned about my health. Or else he is trying to fatten me up for the kill.”
A waiter announced, “Mr. Williams, we have some awfully pretty oysters today.”
Williams’s eyes lit up. “Pretty? Well, this is a phenomenon. I have never seen a pretty oyster in my life. You see, Robert, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” He turned back to the waiter. “Bring me eleven pretty oysters and one old ugly one!” He screamed with laughter and they all ordered oysters Rockefeller. Dena thought he might be drunk, but he picked up the conversation precisely where they had left off.
“The line between the public life and the private life has been erased, due to the rapid decline of manners and courtesy. There is a certain crudeness and crassness that has suddenly become accepted behavior, even desirable. But you are talking to a relic left over from the war before the cannibals took over. I’m just an old barnacle still clinging to that shaky, rotten pier of civility.”
The waiter brought their lunch, and when he put the plate down, Williams said, “Point out the ugly one, Louis.” Louis pointed and said, “There it is, Mr. Williams.”
“Fine. I’ll save it for last.”
After he left, Williams said, “Louis has soul. Any man who can perceive beauty in an oyster is a poet. Leave him a large tip, Robert; he must be rewarded.”
After he had eaten, he said, “Ahh, just like in life. Sometimes the ugly ones are the most delicious.” He sat back.
“Mr. Williams, do you believe in God?” The question surprised her and after she asked, she wondered why she had.
He seemed amused. “God? Well, he’s either the meanest bastard that ever lived or the most careless. He certainly has an uncanny talent for looking the other way, turning a deaf ear. But I’m still trying to hold on to a thread. Trying not to get mean and bitter, like little Truman. I wouldn’t be surprised if Capote doesn’t start biting people any day now.” He laughed. “And that would be a poisonous bite, baby! All I know is that our civilization is a result of struggling and defining the ultimate truth.”
“What is that?”
“We must be kind and forgive one another or we won’t survive. But even among the most religious there seems to be a great blind spot covering the world, an inability to learn from past experience. Civilization is as precarious as a sand castle. All the care and effort it took to create it can be knocked down in a second by some bully or another. And the world is full of bullies. But I suppose we have got to keep trying. Who knows, maybe one day … but don’t look to me for answers, baby. I’m looking myself, in every nook and cranny. People come here year after year looking for answers, but I have none. The body and soul have already been stripped. Nothing left but a few old bones for you to rummage around in. You got here too late.”
Dena slowly closed her notebook. “Mr. Williams, I lied to you. I really didn’t come here to interview you. I don’t know why I came here … except that I love your plays. I guess I wanted to ask you how to survive. How have you survived?”
“How?” He sat silent for a long moment. “By a concerted effort on my part to develop some small milieu of insensitivity. And then there’s sex, and booze, drugs, anything to soften the blow, to dim the glare and muffle the noise—anything to keep the world at bay. I’ve even resorted to insanity, of course; in or out of the loony bin, we are all insane. But at least the ones in the bin are being watched. That’s something. It’s the ones who are loose that you have to worry about, the ones making the bombs to blow the world up eight times over. Now, if that isn’t a valid enough reason for confinement to a mental institution, I don’t know what is.”
His voice began to drift off. “The earth, baby … sometimes I think it’s just a holding pen for crackpots. Who knows what planets have discarded us as factory rejects, unfit to live among more civilized planetary societies. We may be living on the dark side of the moon and don’t know it.”
He seemed a million miles away and Dena realized he was tired. She did not want to overstay her welcome. She reached for her purse. “Mr. Williams, I can’t thank you enough for your time. I really appreciate your seeing me, I really do.”
When she stood up Williams tried to stand, but he was unsteady and Robert had to help him to sit again.
He looked up at her. “Miss Nordstrom, I find myself in the embarrassing position of not being able to accompany you back to your hotel, but Robert will be your gentleman escort. Do you mind?”
“Oh, no, that’s all right, I can find my way.”
“I wouldn’t hear of it. Robert can pick me up on his return. I have enjoyed our luncheon. I’m afraid I don’t look at television, but I’m told that you are headed in the direction of fame and success, so I suppose our meeting has been like two strangers passing one another on a narrow road, one coming from the front lines, the other walking toward it.”
He started to say something more, then hesitated. “But you probably don’t want to listen to the drunken babbling of a failed playwright.”
“Mr. Williams,” Dena said, “first of all, you are not a failed anything. And I would listen to anything you said.”
His eyes suddenly became watery and he looked away. “Then I would warn you, I would say, run, baby—turn around and run for your life before it’s too late.”
As she and Robert left the restaurant, Dena could see Williams’s reflection in the mirror in the hall, a small man, alone, with his hand raised to order another drink. It broke her heart because she could see that his heart had been broken.
That night she had the same dream again about trying to find her mother.
The next morning she sat up in bed in the hotel room in a cold sweat remembering what Tennessee Williams had said. When one has a secret, fear of public exposure can be devastating.
Sookie’s Secret
Dallas, Texas
1963
After Dena’s photograph had appeared on the cover of Seventeen she had been offered drama and speech scholarships to colleges all over the country, but her favorite teacher had advised her to accept the one from Southern Methodist University in Dallas. And from the moment Dena had walked on campus, she was a star. Everywhere she went, people would stare and all the sororities fought to get her. But Dena herself did not seem to notice or be fully aware of her impact on others. The boys and the male teachers tripped all over themselves when she passed by, and the girls secretly longed for what they mistakenly thought to be her sophistication and maturity. In truth, Dena was shy and uncomfortable with people her own age. She was always friendly and pleasant but not someone who was easy to get to know. A part of her always seemed distant and removed. She had only one really close friend, her roommate, Sarah Jane Krackenberry, but even with Sookie, Dena did not talk about herself. All Sookie had ever been able to find out was that Dena had attended several different schools and her mother was a career woman who worked as a buyer for a big department store in Chicago and traveled a lot. She had mentioned a few relatives in Missouri but Sookie never met them.
Dena could be fun at parties but as a rule, she lived in her own little dream world and walked around unconscious of the fact that she was viewed by most as some sort of enigma, some sort of mystery to be solved. She took little interest in boys and spent most of her free time alone, at movies or working over at the college theater. Her date-crazed sorority sisters were baffled as to why she would turn down the best-looking boys on campus to work on sets or watch a rehearsal of some stupid play. Pre
tty soon everyone came to the same conclusion: she must have some incredibly handsome, secret boyfriend. Sookie and Margaret McGruder had even followed Dena over to the theater late one night, but Dena was alone on stage, apparently rehearsing. This secret-boyfriend speculation went around like wildfire and curiosity peaked to the breaking point, especially with Margaret McGruder and Sally Ann Sockwell, who were now so wild to know who he was and what he looked like that they could no longer contain themselves. One Saturday afternoon, when they were sure Dena was at a rehearsal, they sneaked down the hall at the Kappa house in sunglasses and raincoats and knocked on Sookie’s and Dena’s door.
Sookie appeared in a green chenille robe, her red hair rolled up in bubble-gum-pink sponge rollers. She was in the middle of giving herself a facial and looked like she had just dipped her face in a pan of cement, but the girls were used to such sights. Sookie tried to speak without disturbing her mud pack. “What is it?”
“Sookie,” Margaret said, “come on, we just know Dena must have some love letters or some clues or a picture of him in there. We want to see if we can find any.”
Sally Ann, who was dating Sookie’s brother, Buck, said, “Please … we are just dying to know who it is and what he looks like. I’ll bet he’s a Greek god!”
“She won’t know, I promise,” said Margaret McGruder, “we’ll never tell a soul.”
“Nooo! I’m not going to let you come in here and spy on my roommate.”
“Please. We’d do the same for you. Please, we won’t mess up anything; she won’t even know we were here.”
“No, I can’t. She’d kill me if she ever found out.”
Margaret stuck her foot in the door before Sookie could close it. “We are not going away until you let us in. You know you are just dying to know who it is, too. Come on, Sook, we won’t be but a minute.”
Sookie, usually easily manipulated, stood her ground. “No. If anybody is going to spy on her, it will be me, not you. I’m her roommate.”
