IN THE MID-20th CENTURY, there was an LGBT network of literary figures whose professional and personal lives were discreetly—and sometimes not so discreetly—intertwined, a roster that included such writers as Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Christopher Isherwood, John Ashbery, W. H. Auden, and Glenway Wescott. In the midst of that heady configuration was a dashing gay couple whose names are far less familiar to us, but who would have an unexpected literary impact in the 21st century. Donald Windham and Sandy M. Campbell were patrons of the arts whose legacy would eventually become the Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes.
Brimming with charm, elegance, and wit, they became friends not only with leading literary figures of that era but also with notables in the visual and performing arts, including artists Paul Cadmus, Joseph Cornell, Pavel Tchelitchew, Jared French, and George Platt Lynes; actors Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, and Montgomery Clift; and dance impresario Lincoln Kirstein.
Windham and Campbell
Born in Atlanta in 1920, Donald Windham was raised by his widowed mother and aunt in a large Victorian home that was a sad reminder of the family’s once prosperous past. By the time he’d reached his teens in Depression-era Georgia, even the house was gone. Following high school, his mother got him a job rolling barrels through the warehouse at the Coca-Cola factory where she worked as a receptionist. At the age of nineteen, in early 1940, he took a Greyhound bus to New York City with his Atlanta lover, graphic artist Fred Melton, age 21, whom he had met at a gathering of local artists and writers. But seeking to be a writer, being gay and in a relationship, Windham knew that Atlanta in the early 1940s was not where he wanted to be.
In New York, Windham and Melton met Tennessee Williams, a promising but not yet famous 28-year-old writer, when “a mutual acquaintance [Harold Vinal, publisher of Voices magazine] brought him to the furnished room where Fred Melton and I were living in Manhattan, newly arrived from Atlanta and practically penniless,” Windham wrote, adding: “In his eyes our attachment was as romantic as his independence was heroic in mine.” The three became close friends, with Williams quickly connecting them to New York artistic and gay society. Williams encouraged Windham to keep writing, something he had started to work on in Atlanta and continued to do in New York, focusing on his young life in Georgia. Windham and Williams would forge an especially deep friendship, which ended publicly many years later, in 1977, following Windham’s publication of personal letters that he had received from Williams over the years.
In 1942, Windham became an editorial assistant under Lincoln Kirstein at the ballet magazine The Dance Index. When he was drafted, the young man declared himself to be homosexual and was rejected. But when Kirstein was called to duty in 1943, he did not take this route, was drafted into service, and handed over the editorship of the magazine to Windham, who used it to further his entrée into the New York literary and artistic worlds.
Around this time, Windham began working on his first novel while also co-writing the play You Touched Me with Williams, based on a D. H. Lawrence short story. It was Williams’ only co-authored play. And while the idea for the project originated with Windham, he never really got credit for his contribution. In late 1945, You Touched Me received a short-lived Broadway production of 109 performances, featuring the romantic lead Montgomery Clift, who had earlier been Windham’s lover. Theater critic Lewis Nichols wrote in The New York Times that the play was “verbose and filled with lofty and long speeches; it needs editing as well as cohesion.” Nevertheless, its production allowed Windham to quit his job as editor of The Dance Index and continue working on what was to become the novel Dog Star. (In 1953, Williams wanted to direct a play by Windham titled The Starless Air in Houston, but plans for a Broadway run fell apart when Williams couldn’t find the time to stage the play in New York.)
Windham met Campbell when he and Melton visited the studio of artist Paul Cadmus, for whom Campbell, a college undergraduate, was modeling for a portrait of dancers titled Reflection. Strikingly different from Windham in background, the boyishly handsome Campbell, born in 1922, had privileged beginnings, having grown up in New Jersey as the son of the owner of Magnus Chemical Co., a manufacturing company that made detergents and cleaning products. He attended the Kent School in Connecticut and then went to Princeton on the Army’s student deferment plan, where he became passionate about acting and literature. Deciding not to finish Princeton in his final year and declining to go into the family business, Campbell arrived in New York City hoping to become an actor. In the 1940s and ‘50s, he got small roles in several major Broadway productions, including Crime and Punishment, Richard III, Cyrano de Bergerac, and A Streetcar Named Desire. During his modest acting career, he performed alongside Marlon Brando, Spencer Tracy, Jessica Tandy, Lillian Gish, Tallulah Bankhead, José Ferrer, and Lois Smith. He was also in a few films and TV shows of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Always prone to stage fright, Campbell eventually stopped acting in the late 1950s and turned to writing profiles for Harper’s Magazine on subjects such as Nora Joyce, E. M. Forster, and his friends Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt. He also worked as a fact checker for The New Yorker (including on its serialization of In Cold Blood). He occasionally wrote unsigned book reviews. He also wrote the privately published B: Twenty-Nine Letters from Coconut Grove, chronicling his time in a pre-Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire with Tallulah Bankhead. From that book: “Miss Bankhead arrived dressed in tan slacks. She was dragging a lion cub on a leash. … ‘Who’s this?’ she asked the stage manager, pointing at me. ‘He’s going to play the cloak-room attendant.’ ‘Oh my God, he’s a child! Darling, excuse me,’ she said, coming up to me.”
In any case, after that first meeting at Paul Cadmus’ studio, which was seemingly a case of love at first sight, Campbell and Windham were together for 45 years and lived primarily in a rent-controlled, two-story apartment on Central Park South.
Windham and Williams
While Windham’s literary output did not achieve the level of commercial success or critical acclaim that many of his friends had achieved, a few of his books were praised by some critics. Many featured LGBT characters, gay themes, and explicit situations. His first novel, The Dog Star, published in 1950, centers on a young Southern man who’s haunted by the suicide of his best friend at reform school. Despite a positive critical response, particularly in England, and praise from Thomas Mann and André Gide, the novel found little success in the U.S.
A subsequent novel, The Hero Continues (1960), which was based on the life of Tennessee Williams, was about a Broadway playwright seduced by success. That same year, Windham received a Guggenheim fellowship for fiction and published The Warm Country, which featured an introduction by Forster. It was a collection of seventeen short stories, most of which had originally been published outside the U.S. Two of the stories, “The Warm Country” and “Servants with Torches,” treated homosexuality both openly and as a hidden subtext. He also published a series of recollections in The New Yorker about his Depression-era youth in Georgia. The collected stories later became his highly regarded 1964 autobiography, Emblems of Conduct. It contained a blurb by his close friend Truman Capote, who wrote: “A writer of admirable quality, and one long deserved of a larger audience.”
His 1955 novel Two People was about a love affair between a middle-aged New York stockbroker named Forrest whose wife has left him and a seventeen-year-old Italian boy in Rome. “Love’s power is that it lets you live outside your own body,” says Forrest. “It is present in affection’s most immaterial manifestations, in the knowledge that your thoughts contain another person, and that another person has you in his mind. Its biological end is the creation of a new body, and because of this it has been taught that the love between men should remain chaste. But life is not so clearly defined.” The book was savaged by critics and failed commercially. Over the next 25 years, due in no small part to Campbell’s efforts, Windham’s subsequent books were private editions, published by Stamperia Valdonega in Verona, Italy, several of which were eventually picked up by mainstream publishers in the U.S.
Windham’s novel Tanaquil (1972) was based on the life of photographer George Platt Lynes, famous for his fashion photographs but noted privately for his nude and homoerotic photos. It was a roman à clef about New York in the 1950s. Stone in the Hourglass, his last novel (1981), was described as “a wildly intricate adventure dealing with corruption in the arts—both painting and literature. It is an unequivocal, intellectual tour de force pretending to be a thriller, and mayhem pervades every preposterous turn of plot.” His final book was the memoir 1948, Italy: Letters to Sandy (1998). A limited edition of E. M. Forster’s Letters to Donald Windham was published by Campbell in 1975.
However, it was Windham’s Tennessee Williams’ Letters to Donald Windham 1940-1965, published in 1977, that earned him the most attention, while at the same time sabotaging his friendship with the playwright. This book was a response to Williams’ own unreliable and myth-making Memoirs (1975), which barely mentioned Windham, who felt that it bore little resemblance to the man he knew (“a full retinue of misinformation”). Before publishing, he asked for and received Williams’ permission to publish his letters to Windham. In the preface, Windham intriguingly called Williams “the rarest, most intoxicating, the most memorable flower that has blossomed in my garden of good and evil.” Later he would write: “For my part, in our relationship, I had gone from wanting to protect him to wanting to protect myself.”
Reviewing the book for The New York Times, Robert Brustein wrote that the letters detailed Williams’ erotic experiences “with hustlers, rough trade, sailors, and young boys that cruise through his waking and dreaming life like so many wind-up toys. … The love that previously dared not speak its name has now grown hoarse from screaming it. … If revenge is a dish that tastes best cold, then Donald Windham has certainly fixed himself a satisfying frozen dinner.” Still, the really significant thing in these pages for biographers, analysts, and just plain literary gossips is not Williams’ “erotomania” but rather his treatment of friends and acquaintances, for this provides the most revealing and, let us admit it, the most amusing passages of the book. Although Williams expresses impatience with Truman Capote’s “callous sort of bitchery,” he has a pretty impressive gift himself for planting teeth in another’s back. When he meets Gore Vidal, for example, he professes to be “crazy” about him (“a beauty and only 23”), but one month later, he is saying: “I liked him but only through the strenuous effort it took to overlook his conceit. He has studied ballet and is constantly doing pirouettes and flexing his legs, and the rest of the time he is comparing himself and Truman Capote … to such figures as Dostoyevsky and Balzac.”
The letters show many sides of Williams, from passionate to self-absorbed to playful, often with a recognizable touch of the poet-playwright. From the gay enclave of Provincetown, he writes to “the boys”:
The “crowd” here is dominated by a platinum blond Hollywood belle named Doug and a bull-dike named Wanda who is a well-known writer under a male pen-name. The most raffish and fantastical crew that I have met yet and even I—excessively broadminded as I am—feel somewhat shocked by the goings-on. However, the sun has come out and the lonely sand-dunes, sea-gulls and blue ocean is an excellent katharsis [sic]for a “sin-sick soul.” All of this will go very nicely into a play some day.
In the book of letters, Windham quotes from a New York Times interview with Williams: “The real fact is that no one means a great deal to me, anyway. … I prefer people who can help me some way or other, and most of my friendships are accidental.” But, Windham adds: “I had a hard time convincing outraged acquaintances that he was saying no one meant a great deal to him compared to his work, that he preferred people whose private responses helped him with this private vocation.” That response by Windham was representative of his largely sympathetic stance toward Williams—despite much mistreatment by the latter, which Williams characterized as Windham’s “morbid humility.”
When the letters were published, Williams took offense at what he considered an unflattering presentation—and perhaps Windham’s pointed editorializing. It ended their long friendship and inaugurated nearly a decade of lawsuits and recriminations. Windham’s 1987 memoir Lost Friendships dealt with the aftermath of the Letters as well as a detailed narrative of his relationship with Williams over the years, as well as with Truman Capote, whom Windham befriended in 1948. “Truman and Williams never became close, despite Truman’s wishing it,” wrote Windham. About both, he wrote: “As highly rewarded with celebrity and money as they were, each considered himself under-appreciated … a personal example of the failure of America to value and recompense its artists.”
Windham took the opportunity to go deeper into Williams’ professional and personal life. “As for being sexually repressed,” Windham wrote, “the evening I met him and throughout the first years of our acquaintances, his quotidian goal was to end up in bed with a partner at least once before the twenty-four hours were over.”
A Legacy for Writers to Come
Summing up Windham’s character and his connection to Williams, Michael Kelleher, director of the Windham-Campbell Prize, writes the following:
Donald was … the loyal one, the good guy, always trying to keep these drunken genius friends on track. My sense of things, based on Donald’s book, was that he was clearly wounded by Tennessee and Truman, but especially Tennessee. Donald was someone who was ambitious to a point, but his friendships were more important than his career. I don’t think that was true about most of his friends. He struggled with the fact that Tennessee was going to put writing and fame above anything they experienced together. I think Tennessee was like, “I’m off to stardom, man,” and there was this 20-feet-from-stardom thing with Donald, and with Sandy, too.
While clearly accomplished, Windham’s talents were eclipsed by those of his dazzling friends. Gore Vidal, remarking in his later years on a photograph of himself with Williams and Windham having brunch together in New York in the ’40s, described Williams as “the greatest writer of the century” and then off-handedly referred to Windham as “a good novelist.”
“It’s a fascinating story,” comments Kelleher. “How does that penniless guy from Atlanta [Windham] go to NYC and suddenly find himself hanging out with the literary elite and all these great artists of the time?” Indeed, the story of both Windham and Campbell could be a Ryan Murphy mini-series. It would reflect a world of midcentury glamour, filled with bitchiness, celebrity, money, egos, and sex—as it dealt with their turbulent friendships with Williams and Capote. But it would also be a great love story of two gay men, Windham and Campbell, in a closeted era who had a nearly half-century open relationship, and whose passion for literature and whose accidental fortune would result in one of the great legacies of the present century.
Campbell died suddenly of a heart attack at age 66 while having breakfast at Windham’s and his house on Fire Island. Windham later wrote movingly about their last matter-of-fact morning together in a short story whose title bears the date of Campbell’s death, “June 26, 1988.” Windham became the beneficiary of his partner’s sizable estate, mostly stock in the Campbell family business. But he continued to lead a modest life, living off the interest while the principal ballooned to $50 million over the next 22 years.
Years earlier, the couple, having no heirs, had agreed to establish a fund for awarding generous monetary prizes to promising writers to free them from financial worries for a time and allow them to focus on their work. Following Windham’s death at age 89 in 2010, the Donald Windham–Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes were created. It is now the largest annual financial gift in the world in its collective amount given annually and exclusively to English-language writers. To date, 99 writers from 21 countries have been recipients. The prizes, which are administered by Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, total $1.4 million annually, with $175,000 given to each of eight writers in four literary categories: two dramatists, two poets, two fiction writers, and two nonfiction writers.
The names of the recipients are announced in March, and in mid-September the writers participate in several days of readings, lectures, and discussions in New Haven. Prize winners over the past eleven years—many from the LGBT community—have included Tarell Alvin McCraney, Naomi Wallace, Kia Corthron, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Lucas Hnath, Suzan-Lori Parks, Julia Cho, Michael R. Jackson, Margo Jefferson, and Dominique Morisseau.
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A FOOTNOTE: Campbell began book collecting at an early age, writing to authors asking if he could send along his book to be signed. His library included signed first editions by Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov, William Faulkner, and E. M. Forster, as well as books personally annotated by authors such as Katherine Anne Porter, Isak Dinesen, Alice B. Toklas, and Marianne Moore. Most of these are housed in the Windham-Campbell collection at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where the Donald Windham and Sandy M. Campbell collection of more than fifty years of photos, mementos, and correspondence is also archived.
Frank Rizzo is a theater writer and critic for Variety and a freelance journalist based in New York City and New Haven.
