The World of Tennessee Williams
Revised and Updated Edition
by Richard Freeman Leavitt and Kenneth Holditch
Hansen Publishing Group LLC
118 pages, $14.95
Tennessee Williams in Provincetown
by David Kaplan
Hansen. 133 pages, $14.95
Tenn at One Hundred: The Reputation of Tennessee Williams
by David Kaplan
Hansen. 328 pages, $29.95
Tennessee Williams and Company: His Essential Screen Actors
by John DiLeo
Hansen. 204 pages, $25.95
IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE Tennessee Williams ever reaching his centenary, given his conviction, most of his adult life, that he was about to die, a fear that mostly centered on heart disease. The fact that another of Williams’ fears was suffocation makes it cruelly ironic that he probably died of just that in 1983 while on a visit to New York. Alone in his room at the Hotel Elysee, having given orders to his secretary in an adjoining room that he was not to be disturbed, he apparently choked to death after removing the cap of a bottle of medicine with his teeth. He was only 71—too soon for someone as life-loving and productive as the man Gore Vidal (in his two wonderful essays on Williams) called “the Glorious Bird,” but that apparently is how either America’s greatest playwright, or one of America’s greatest playwrights, depending on whom you talk to, perished.
Among Williams’ many striking titles is that of a short play called I Rise in Flames, Cried the Phoenix, which might provide the caption for the increasing respect he has been given since his death 28 years ago at a time when critics had written him off as a drug-addled has-been. In this centennial year, festivals based on Williams proliferate. There has long been one in New Orleans, but now there are two more: in Provincetown, where he stayed on four different occasions; and Clarksdale, Mississippi, where he lived as a child with his grandparents until the age of six, when his father—a salesman who loved being on the road (better put, a man who, in Williams’ phrase, “fell in love with long distance”)—was promoted to manager of the shoe company he worked for in St. Louis. Although he’s buried there, St. Louis is a city that Williams rarely missed a chance to denigrate—as Kenneth Holditch, a retired New Orleans college professor and friend of Williams, points out, with almost comic insistence, in Richard Leavitt’s The World of Tennessee Williams, one of four books on the playwright that the Hansen Publishing Group has just issued. Leavitt’s book is a brief biography begun by him and completed by Holditch after Leavitt’s death. (Holditch also edited a journal on Williams for ten years before funds ran out and is the editor of the Library of America edition of the plays, which has just come out.) Tenn at One Hundred contains essays by scholars, friends, and critics whose topics include a study of the censorship problems the movie Baby Doll faced, an account of the opening night of The Glass Menagerie, of the Boston flop Battle of Angels, an essay on the climate of homophobia (among critics) in which Williams had to operate, a discussion of why he did not get the Nobel Prize, an essay on how his movies were marketed, a short survey of his biographers, a piece on his relationship with his agent Audrey Wood, an appraisal of his later plays, an essay on his image in popular culture, another on Camino Real, and a memoir by a friend. For all the specificity of these essays, it’s the brief overview of Williams’ career provided by the Leavitt book, The World of Tennessee Williams, that is the most thought-provoking. To be reminded of the order in which Williams wrote his plays can be startling. So, too, is learning the extent to which he tried things in different forms (short story, one-acts) and kept rewriting, even after a play had been produced. The Night of the Iguana, for instance, his last Broadway hit, based on a trip he had taken as a penniless young man to Mexico, was a one-act for many years before he turned it into its final form. The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone was written long before he reached the age at which his heroine is left high and dry by the passage of Time. All of this leads one to think that Vidal may have been right when he said that Williams had only a few cards in his deck, which he shuffled and reshuffled. “All work is autobiographical if it is serious,” Williams wrote. “Everything a writer produces is sort of his inner history, transposed into another time.” The World of Tennessee Williams provides an arc that one can lose sight of in more specialized views of the playwright. Reading Leavitt, one is reminded that Williams was in almost constant motion, which is why places as disparate as Key West and Clarksdale, New Orleans, and Provincetown, can claim a connection. Leavitt’s book reminds us that he was a peripatetic and a poet who said of himself that his chief impulse in writing a play was the creation of character, and that when the writing worked, it was because of its poetic nature. More people have probably become acquainted with Williams through film than through live performance. The fourth book in this quartet is an oversize paperback by John DiLeo called Tennessee Williams and Company: His Essential Screen Actors. Included are actors that we immediately associate with Williams—Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh, Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman, Anna Magnani—and ones who may not come to mind as quickly—Mildred Dunnock, Karl Malden, Geraldine Page, Richard Burton, and Madeleine Sherwood (who plays the mother of the “no-neck monsters” in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Boss Finley’s girlfriend in Sweet Bird of Youth). Besides excellent photographs of these luminaries, DiLeo’s book is filled with information about who almost was cast, who should have been cast, the complete career of each actor discussed, not to mention a scene by scene, almost camera angle by camera angle, discussion of the Williams movies in which they played. In short, it’s a movie maven’s dream—or nightmare; there are times when one feels the book’s hands around one’s throat. Opinionated, intelligent, exhaustive, and exhausting, it’s the sort of thing one should probably not try to read all at once. But if you want the dish on a Williams movie, it’s all here. DiLeo is not shy about making judgments. Elizabeth Taylor, for instance, is praised for her performance in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, then raked over the coals for Suddenly Last Summer and Boom, the movie version of The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, in which Talluluah Bankhead had starred onstage. “The role of Mrs. Goforth,” DiLeo writes, in a typical mix of opinion and fact, “might have been the occasion for a serious comeback by Bette Davis (who had already swiped for herself other Tallulah stage vehicles: Dark Victory and The Little Foxes).” But: “A potential Davis triumph became an opportunity wasted on Taylor.” The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore began the long period of decline in Williams’ commercial career. It’s a play that seems to have as rich a subject as any of his other great works but which has already begun to stray from the poetic realism that made him part of the mainstream. After that, it was pretty much one flop after another. For a playwright who believed serious writing was autobiographical, there was something poignant in his turning to a historical subject like Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald for his late play, Clothes for A Summer Hotel, or, worse, reworking material that he’d already used before, like Vieux Carré. Had he run out of subject matter? Or was it that the times, the culture in which he was living, had changed? For a long time Williams had been playing a double game—creating romantic works whose gothic secrets were often nothing more nor less than same-sex desire (Suddenly Last Summer and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof). But by the time he wrote The Night of the Iguana and The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, Williams seems to have been interested in more existential matters—death superseding sex—which brings us, ironically, to the Tony Awards this past June. One reason that Williams ended up writing about the Fitzgeralds and going back to his youthful days in New Orleans might be that his own sexuality was less urgent than it had been in his twenties, when he fell in love with Kip Kiernan in Provincetown (the main subject of Kaplan’s book), and also less dramatic on stage. In short, homosexuality was no longer portentous in the way it once had been. That dark and mysterious closet in American culture was empty. At the Tony Awards this year, Neil Patrick Harris, an openly gay actor—married to another man, with two children by a surrogate—opened the show by singing “sodomy’s not required” if you want to enjoy Broadway because “it’s not just for gays anymore!” This, on the same night that Larry Kramer was honored for his play The Normal Heart. When someone compared this opening number’s effect to that of “Springtime for Hitler” (in Mel Brooks’ The Producers), he wasn’t far off. Yet the number recognized one of the changes that has erased the world in which Williams wrote. The irony is that the plays Williams wrote when homosexuality was taboo were so much richer than what we get today. It’s like the cathedrals of Europe: the belief system that created them has faded, but the stained glass, the flying buttresses remain—which is why the festivals continue, and books like these four offerings from Hansen Publishing come out. Tennessee Williams seems more glorious with each passing year. Andrew Holleran’s most recent book is Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath
The grand-daddy of biographies of Williams—though it stops at the opening of The Glass Menagerie—is still the massive volume by Lyle Leverich, another biographer (and friend of Leavitt and Holditch) who died before he could complete his work. Volume Two of the Leverich biography is being written by the New Yorker theatre critic John Lahr, who has a long and fascinating—if painful to read—essay about Williams in another book published by Hansen: Tenn at One Hundred: The Reputation of Tennessee Williams. This is a collection of essays edited by David Kaplan, who founded and runs the festival in Provincetown and has written yet another of the Hansen publications, Tennessee Williams in Provincetown—an account of his life in that refuge for the gay and the artistic. If this sounds a little incestuous, no matter: Williams deserved a group of close friends and passionate fans like these—particularly in light of the havoc wreaked after his death by the infamous Lady Maria St. Just, who was neither a lady, Williams remarked, nor a saint, nor just, but whom Williams selected as a trustee of the estate he funded to care for his beloved sister Rose, institutionalized in New England after a lobotomy performed to cure her schizophrenia.
