Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (83 page)

IN THE YEARS after
Red Devil
closed—a “coup-de-disgrace,” Williams called it—the playwright felt as if he were vanishing in plain sight. Despite his self-deprecating laughter and his gallant public shows of endurance—“I am like some old opera star who keeps making farewell appearances,” he said—he was fading like a photograph. “Aside from you, the New York
Times
appears to ignore my continuing efforts and sometimes accomplishments in the theatre,” Williams wrote to Walter Kerr. “I wonder if you might encourage them to give me a sense of continuance. . . . I’m sure you understand my longing for these little reminders . . . that I am still living.” When Roger Stevens, the chairman of the Kennedy Center, called Williams in 1979 to tell him that he was to be celebrated in the second annual Kennedy Center Honors, Williams replied, “Why, Roger, you must think I’m dead.”

Writing in the
New York
Times
in May 1977, Williams noted, “I am widely regarded as the ghost of a writer, a ghost still visible.” The declaration, which was meant to both disabuse and defy his critics, was a brazen maneuver that went well beyond the usual game of show-and-tell that he played with the public. Although his near-death experiences were a frequent part of his public palaver—he was “imminently posthumous,” as he confessed to Dick Cavett in 1979—Williams had never before declared himself dead. For him to admit to his ghostliness in print was a signal of his desperation, as well as his self-loathing.

He did, on occasion, however, play dead. At a boring Key West production of
Twelfth Night
, Williams extricated himself from his fourth-row center seat before the intermission by gasping loudly, “Help! Get me some medicine! Help!” “I phoned Tennessee to see if he was alright,” William Prosser, the director who was near him, said. “He replied in full health, ‘Oh, you know baby, I never did much like
Twelfth Night.
’ ” In 1975, dismayed at the early rehearsals of the Vienna version of
The
Red Devil Battery Sign
, Williams had a large oxygen tank brought up to his hotel suite, sent for the leading lady and the director, who were the husband-and-wife owner-managers of the small theater, and pretended to be stricken, “so they might hear the dying playwright’s last words on how the production was killing him,” St. Just, who was present at his performance, said. In his diaries, on December 16, 1976, Peter Hall, then the artistic director of Britain’s Royal National Theatre, reported Williams’s glee at another “death.” “The lady who produced my new play on Broadway organised a seminar,” Williams told Hall. “As I went into the seminar I saw that the notice for closing the play was up on the stage-door notice board. I thought this odd as I was doing the seminar to boost business.” Williams continued, “After the seminar I asked the lady producer why the notice was up. She said she had no more money. I told her this was a shock to me as I had a cardiac condition. I threw myself down on the floor. She screamed and called for a doctor. I rose from the floor roaring with laughter.”

Implicit in the dramaturgy of these scenes was Williams’s almost compulsive desire to compel emotional surrender. “Tenn used death to control the play,” said Rader, who sometimes “played second lead in Tennessee’s death act when we were trying to get drugs from a doctor.” “I saw him use it most in places where he was trying to pick up a reluctant boy who had never heard of him and hoped that an appeal to their common humanity might do the trick. It usually did. It didn’t in the case of Hiram Walker, an actor I knew who told me about it. Tennessee staggered over to the bed and, facing him, rolled his eyes and fell backward on the mattress. ‘Hold me, baby, I’m dying,’ Tenn said. Hiram sat beside him and held Tennessee’s hand, which annoyed him. Hiram asked if he should call the doctor. ‘Doctor? It’s too late for the doctor,’ Tennessee said. ‘Leave! I prefer to die alone.’ ”

For Williams, who claimed to be “inordinately possessed of the past,” playwriting had always been a negotiation with the dead; by calling ghosts out of himself and onto the stage, he allowed them to reenter the realm of time. Now, in his later years, he was haunted not only by the ghosts of others but by the ghost of himself. His plays teemed with apparitions. The resurgence of the spectral in his drama began with two excellent pieces: the poignant teleplay
Stopped Rocking
(which was never filmed) and
Vieux Carré
, a memory play about his journeyman days in New Orleans, both of which Williams completed in 1974 as “alternate projects” during the long wait for
Red Devil
to be mounted.

Stopped Rocking
, originally titled “A Second Epiphany for My Friend Maureen,” was written for and dedicated to Maureen Stapleton. The story maps the trajectory into ghostliness of the fragile Janet Svenson, whose husband, Olaf, is having her transferred from the Catholic sanatorium, where she has spent the past five years, to the state mental facility. Since Janet’s hospitalization, Olaf has built a new life and plans to move out of state with his new partner. Guilt-ridden and gauche, he treats Janet as a kind of disembodied figure, at once trapped in time and outside of it. In order to break the news gently to Janet, who still pines for him, Olaf takes her on a tragicomic trailer “holiday” in the Ozarks. On their trip, Olaf and Janet pass through a “spectral country” that is symbolic of the internal retreat that Olaf predicts for her:

No, not alone, with fantasies, apparitions, perfect companions for you. Creatures you invent make no demands on you. You’ll dream your own world, Maw, with complete possession of it. . .

Reality gives no rest, it gives no peace. For you: stopping, resting.

Janet, however, envisions a different form of oblivion. “No more Sunday visits, now, ever, not longer between but never, never ever—those—long words, never ever,” she says in a heartbreaking line that doesn’t move the stolid Olaf. Doomed to a living death, Janet throws herself into a river, only to be saved and stuffed with antidepressants by Olaf, who returns her to the sanatorium and, as the play’s title indicates, to oblivion. In her last close-up, Janet is shown as a kind of disembodied lost soul, “utterly peaceful and ‘resigned from life.’ ” By the end of the play, although he is still moving among the living, Olaf, too, has “stopped rocking.” Olaf, who is nicknamed “Stone Man,” has become one: “stone outside and in, all the way through, in other words, plain heartless.”

Stopped Rocking
was proposed as a Hallmark movie of the week. Williams requested John Hancock as the director and met with him in Los Angeles to discuss the script. In the years since Williams had last seen Hancock, he had transitioned from theater to film, directing
Sticky My Fingers, Fleet My Feet
(1970), a live-action short that was nominated for an Academy Award, and
Bang the Drum Slowly
(1973), a feature about baseball that gave Robert De Niro his first major role. During his first meeting with Hancock, Williams complained about his physical transformation. According to Hancock, “he told me ruefully how difficult he was finding it to get laid because his body ‘well, isn’t as nice as it once was,’ he said.”

But Hancock came to see that the changes in Williams were more than physical. One night, they ended up at an Italian restaurant on Melrose and Robertson, on the border between Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, because Williams wanted to eat “calamari fritti.” “He was drunk but not out of control,” Hancock recalled. “He was having balance problems as he often did—the synergy, I guess, of downers and booze—and he took my arm to cross the street from the limo to the restaurant. As we approached the far side, there was an opening in the gutter that leads down into those big storm drains that underlie the north-south streets in that area, and, seeing that, he whirled on me with crazed eyes and drew away from me in fear. Later, he confessed that he thought I was going to push him down into the storm drain. I hadn’t realized he was that crazy. It was all chuckled over as if it were some kind of joke, but I remember thinking, Is he still talented enough to be this crazy? I decided he was, but he had greatly changed from the man I’d known earlier.”

In Hancock’s opinion, Williams, in
Stopped Rocking
, “had written another of his great hysteric females and . . . the madness of the middle-of-the-night camping disasters could provide an opportunity for her to have some spectacular arias.” Hoping to make him see how “skimpy” the middle of the script was and to get him excited about expanding it, Hancock collected a distinguished crew of actors—Richard Jordan, Blair Brown, and Harry Hamlin—to read through a few scenes in Williams’s presence at his Malibu house. “I knew we were in trouble when I saw Tennessee get out of the car and stagger toward the front door,” Hancock said. “Here was a ghost. Bill Barnes was with him. They came in, Tennessee stumbling slightly as he came down the three stairs to our sunken living room, and met everybody.”

The actors were arranged in a circle; Williams sat in a chair, with a well-thumbed copy of the screenplay in his lap. He began to read, slurring wildly. “The actors were stunned, embarrassed. We looked at each other. I didn’t know what to do,” Hancock said. “After a page or so I gathered my courage and said, ‘Excuse me, Tennessee, but I don’t think I was clear—we have all these wonderful actors and we want to read the play to you, not you to us.’ ” Williams closed his script, took off his glasses, sat back, and the actors began to read. After a few pages, Hancock looked over at Williams; he was asleep. “Tennessee stirred. Maybe he wasn’t asleep? The actors plowed grimly on. But he was fast asleep,” Hancock recalled. When it was over, Williams mumbled his thank-yous and staggered out to the car. “I never heard from him again,” Hancock said. “Nor, I think, did I see Tennessee ever again, but in a way, he was vanishing even before he had gone.”

VIEUX CARRÉ,
A crepuscular spectacle of dead souls, includes among its spectral figures the jejune Writer himself. First conceived as an evening of two one-act plays (
The Angel in the Alcove
and
I Never Get Dressed until after Dark on Sundays
), it picks up Williams’s story from the end of
The Glass Menagerie
and fills in the journeyman years, when he was a nearly destitute twenty-eight-year-old living in a New Orleans boarding house, afflicted by loneliness and by “a passionate will to create.” Beneath its lyric veneer
The Glass Menagerie
was a battlefield of fierce contending forces: a son trying to break free of a controlling and toxic mother, and a put-upon mother trying to keep her son in place.
Vieux Carré
, a memory play, has no such urgency or argument. “Once this house was alive, it was occupied once. In my recollection, it still is, but by shadowy occupants like ghosts. Now they enter the lighter areas of my memory,” the Writer/Narrator says in the play’s opening lines.

By the play’s end, the Writer has been buffeted as much by a vision of his future as by his past. The last words of
Vieux Carré
resonate two ways: as an augury and as an epitaph. Setting out on the literary adventure of a lifetime, the Writer opens the door to the boardinghouse:

(

)

WRITER: . . . They’re disappearing behind me. Going. People you’ve known in places do that: they go when you go. The earth seems to swallow them up, the walls absorb them like moisture, remain with you only as ghosts: their voices are echoes, fading but remembered.

(

)

This house is empty now.

In early drafts of
Vieux Carré
, there is a scene in which, in the excitement of collaboration, a playwright accidentally tips backward into the orchestra pit. He clambers out. “Old cats know how to fall,” he says. By the time
Vieux Carré
got to Broadway, Williams wasn’t so sure he could bounce back. Shuttling between Bermuda, Atlantic City, and Key West, he avoided most of the previews. “None of us saw Tennessee for a long time until we had major problems with several scenes,” Sylvia Sidney, who played Mrs. Wire, the witchy, intrusive landlady, said. “When he finally arrived, his excuse was, ‘I need to see it on its feet!’ By then it was almost too late.” Williams was hiding from the critics even more than from the production. “I am as frightened as ever of the critics,” he wrote to his director, Arthur Allan Seidelman, in early May 1977, contemplating the prospect of bad reviews. “If we get a ‘Stop’ sign from them, I think we should do something quite spectacularly unusual like publicly challenging them to a debate.” Williams went on, “I am personally quite ready to have a final showdown with them before flying to England and emigrating to Australia because of an unremitting barrage of excrement from those or those who employ them.”

As it happened,
Vieux Carré
lasted only five hapless performances, defeated by poor direction, poor design, and poor producers. “It developed that the backers lacked cash,” Williams wrote in his postmortem, adding, “Behind my back the director went ga-ga and removed the climactic scene of Part One. The narrator (his boy-friend) was an amateurish performer in a part that demanded high professional skill.” Although the production was given a drubbing, Williams’s writing was not. “Tennessee Williams’s voice is the most distinctively poetic, the most idiosyncratically moving, and at the same time the most firmly dramatic to have come the American theatre’s way—ever,” Walter Kerr wrote in the
New York
Times
. “No point in calling the man our best living playwright. He is our best playwright, and let qualifications go hang.” A few American critics, Kerr among them, indicated an interest in seeing future productions. In August 1978, a revised London production of
Vieux Carré
, directed by Keith Hack, was a hit, and it restored honor to the play, which went on to be one of Williams’s most popular late works.