Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) (58 page)

The drugs helped him to deal with his low self-image. On his 54
^th
birthday, he told a journalist, “I hate myself. I feel I bore people, I can’t stand to look in the mirror because I feel I’m too physically repulsive.”

His actress friend, Maureen Stapleton, tried to convince Tennessee that Jacobson was nothing but “an exploitive quack preying on celebrities.”

By 1966, Tennessee had developed a drug dependence so powerful that it was manifested in toxic after-effects. He went with almost no sleep and at times seemed on the verge of hysteria. He became addicted to large dosages of a sedative, Doriden, which had been introduced in 1954.

In a conversational encounter with Truman Capote, Tennessee learned that he, too, was a “patient” of Dr. Feelgood’s. Being Capote, the novelist filled Tennessee in on scandals associated with the quack.

“After getting a shot at the Carlyle, JFK pulled off all his clothes and danced around his hotel suite,” Capote claimed. “He ran out into the hallway and started toward the fire escape until the Secret Service caught him and brought him back.”

“Jacobson also told me that he gave his medical concoction to Nazi soldiers in 1934 and ’35 and that Hitler couldn’t get up in the morning without a shot,” Capote claimed.

In 1936, because of his Jewish background, Jacobson decided his life was in danger. Consequently, he fled that year from Berlin.

Both Tennessee and Truman agreed that each of them experienced an “instant euphoria” after treatments from Jacobson.

Truman asserted that after receiving injections that he felt like Superman. “I feel I can fly when I come out of his office. Ideas for my work come at me with the speed of light. I can work for 72 hours straight with no sleep, not even a coffee break. If it’s sex you’re after, you can go all night on one of his injections.”

“Let me give you the names of some of his patients you might not have known—Sir Winston Churchill, Harry S Truman, Elizabeth Taylor, J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, Richard Burton, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Ingrid Bergman, and Bette Davis. When Marilyn Monroe sang
Happy Birthday
to JFK at Madison Square Garden, she had come directly from one of Dr. Feelgood’s cocktails.”

[The Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs seized Jacobson’s supply; his medical license was revoked in 1975. Jacobson, also called “Miracle Man,” ran out of miracles on December 1, 1979 and died.]

After his death in 1983, many friends of Tennessee were shocked to learn that he had named Maria St. Just as his literary executor. “Who in the hell is Maria St. Just?” asked Elizabeth Taylor.

Born Maria Britneva, in Petrograd, Russia, Maria St. Just never revealed her age—by most accounts, she was born in 1921.

Her father, who had been court physician to the Romanovs, was murdered in one of the Soviet purges. In its aftermath, in 1922, her mother took Maria to live in London. As a girl, Maria studied ballet under the great Tamara Karsavina and later danced at Covent Garden.

As she grew into an adult, she befriended Sir John Gielgud, who got her work in the London theater. At one of his house parties, she met Tennessee Williams. Within minutes, he became her friend for life.

As time went by, he became her benevolent sugar daddy, and she fell in love with him, wanting to believe he was a lapsed heterosexual.

But when Frank Merlo evolved into a more or less permanent feature in Tennessee’s life, she abandoned her pursuit of Tennessee. Instead she married the wealthy Britisher, Peter Grenfell, second Lord St. Just. From then on, she preferred to be addressed as Lady St. Just.

Maria and Tennessee seem to have shared what the French define as an
amitié amoreuse
. Although maintaining a friendly surface relationship with Frank, Maria resented him as both of them vied for influence over the playwright.

She also became jealous of the other women in Tennessee’s life, including “that buck-toothed dyke,” a reference to author Carson McCullers. Maria also was instrumental in turning Tennessee against his longtime literary agent, Audrey Wood.

Maria fancied herself an actress and wanted to star in Tennessee’s plays. He denied her the role of Maggie in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, although he admitted to using her personality as a role model in the development of some of his later characters. He used his influence to get her parts when he could, but in off-Broadway or in road show productions of his plays. She appeared as both Miss Alma in
Summer and Smoke
and as Blanche DuBois in
A Streetcar Named Desire
.

Maria flew in from London to witness Tallulah Bankhead perform in a Broadway (City Center) revival of
Streetcar
. Tennessee claimed that he had originally written the role of Blanche for Tallulah.

According to author Donald Windham, “Bankhead and Lady St. Just hated each other on sight, exchanging insults, much to the delight of Tenn, who was licking his lips at the prospect of a fight between them. He even thought there might be the seed of a play here based on two strong-willed actresses—perhaps Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins, or Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. He did what he could to toss gas on the fire between Bankhead and Lady St. Just.”

Gore Vidal also showed up to observe what was happening.

“Tennessee liked to surround himself with women who adored him but hated each other,” Gore claimed. “He liked his drama both on and off the stage. Some writer called it a grotesque
gavotte
dancing around him. I don’t know what Tennessee gets from these monster women—frankly, I couldn’t tolerate them, including Maria St. Just, the so-called Lady St. Just, with whom I only pretended to be a friend. He had a large appetite for the grotesque in both his art and life. If these
monstres sacrés
provided him with the comforts of the damned, then that was all that mattered.”

Of course, over the long duration of their friendship, Maria and Tennessee had arguments. He once flew to the Venice Film Festival just to achieve a reconciliation with “the raging Tartar, Maria, the Lady St. Just.”

Perhaps sarcastically, he said he was accompanied by the “beautiful people”—Andy Warhol, Sylvia Miles, and Rex Reed. It was aboard the airplane headed to Italy that he developed a lifelong fixation on Joe Dallesandro, the Warhol star.

Director Elia Kazan said, “When Tennessee wanted a loyal, absolutely true reaction to his work, he turned to Maria St. Just. When he wrote his memoir, he sent it to her, then asked what she thought. She informed him that she put it where it belonged—in the wastepaper basket. He was hurt but didn’t drop her. He suspected that in a very short time, he might hold that same opinion himself.”

“To the end of his life, whatever distance separated them, he never lost touch with her,” Kazan said. “He always counted on her when he was troubled or ‘lost.’ The truth saves. So does courage. He could count on her for both.”

After his death in 1983, based on the terms of Tennessee’s will, Maria and an attorney, John Eastman, were named co-trustees of the Rose Williams Trust, the legal entity, named in honor of his sister, which retained ownership, and controlled, the rights to all of Tennessee’s literary work.

Almost immediately, Maria became known as a tyrant in her control of the revival of Tennessee’s staples, and of productions of plays not previously produced. She even prevented publication of a biography of Tennessee by Lyle Leverich, even though Tennessee had approved and agreed to it during the course of his lifetime.

In 1990, Lady St. Just published
Five O’Clock Angel
, a collection of letters addressed to her by Tennessee between 1948 and 1982.

In London, shortly after Maria’s death on February 15, 1994,
The Independent
wrote: “Too rich to care about money, Maria St. Just was only concerned for the integrity of the performance in Tennessee Williams’ plays which she was empowered to authorize.”

Chapter Seventeen

Lillie Mae Faulk was only seventeen
and going to school when a traveling salesman, Archulus (“Arch”) Persons, arrived in the sleepy little town of Monroeville, Alabama. She was hailed as the beauty of the county, but on the surface, he was no prize, with his bottle-thick eyeglasses and his thinning blonde hair. Yet he possessed a certain charm, and on frequent visits to Monroeville, he pursued her.