It was about this time that I began to look about for more permanent, I mean relatively permanent, relations with young men. I hoped to have one with a young Irishman who was appearing in a small part in Winged Victory, which was then playing Chicago and in the same building as Menagerie. I shall not give his name, of course, but he was remarkably handsome and remarkably gifted off-stage. I was staying in the Loop of Chicago, at the Hotel Sherman, and this young Irishman spent the nights with me in my single room and the nightingales sang and sang. I remember one morning we dropped in on Tony, who was recovering from one of his epic hangovers, and it was a mistake for us to do that, since Tony, much as he liked me, was quite obviously overwhelmed at the sight of my young companion. Tony’s hands always shook and he always sweated copiously but that morning, observing my companion, he almost fell to pieces.
Then Winged Victory left town and so did the Irishman, and I took up with a student at the University of Illinois, a tall blond who swam with me at the Chicago “Y” and spent the night with me in my single room at that hotel, the Sherman, and the nightingales continued to sing their hearts out.
I am sorry that so much of this “thing” must be devoted to my amatory activities, but I was late coming out, and when I did it was with one hell of a bang.
It was sometime late last winter when Barbara Baxley, a friend and brilliant performer in two of my plays, called me to tell me that William Inge, with whom she had once had a tender “romance,” with whom he was probably closer than almost anyone else outside his family, had fallen into a desperate situation.
Her feeling for him remained as tenderly concerned as ever.
“He’s going to pieces,” she told me in that inimitable voice of hers. “He keeps himself under sedation all day and night, getting up only to drink and then back under sedation.”
“Oh, then he is on a suicide course: something has to be done.”
“But what? He commits himself voluntarily for two days and then has himself released.”
“Isn’t his sister with him?”
“Yes, Helen’s with him and she’s desperate.”
“Tell her to commit him herself so he can’t get right back out till he has gotten through the present crisis.”
“You call her, Tenn.”
“I don’t know her, Barbara.”
“Introduce yourself to her on the phone and give her that advice before it’s too late. I’ve tried but she seems immobilized with panic.”
Barbara gave me the California telephone number. Before calling, I phoned Maureen Stapleton to confer with her on the advisability of the suggested call to Bill’s sister.
Maureen was equally disturbed. Being a survivor of nervous crises herself, she could empathize with Bill’s and his sister’s dilemma.
I then called the number in Hollywood and Bill’s sister, Mrs. Helen Connell, answered the phone. I introduced myself to her and she lowered her voice to a whisper, saying she never knew whether Bill was listening to calls. She gave me further details of the predicament. He had, she told me, entered the falling-down stage and a few nights ago had fallen down in the shower and suffered deep scalp cuts and she’d had to assist him back to bed. Under his mattress, she told me, he kept strong sedative pills, seven of them a night, and she confirmed Barbara’s report that he only got up now to make a drink and that his pattern was to commit himself to a sanitarium and release himself in two days.
Knowing certain things about Bill, from our long association, I was aware of the fact that he was the type of alcoholic who can’t tolerate a single drink, that he had put up a very brave and successful struggle to abstain completely, was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, and that he suffered from extreme claustrophobia, a fact that explained his inability to accept hospital confinement for more than two days.
I suggested to Mrs. Connell that, being his nearest relative, she commit him herself to the best sort of psychiatric hospital, such as Menninger’s in his home state of Kansas, make sure that he had an attractive and spacious room there, and see that he remained till he was back on his feet.
She suddenly cut the phone conversation short, whispering that she heard him stirring about the house and that he was paranoiac about phone calls. Then she assured me that she would follow my advice.
I was in rehearsals with the most difficult play I have written and made no further call and heard no further from Bill’s sister.
Two days ago I opened the Rome Daily American and saw a photograph of his anguished face: then the caption declaring that he had committed suicide.
I met Bill Inge in December 1944 when I returned home briefly to St. Louis. At that time he was writing for the (defunct) Star-Times, doing dramatic criticism and interviews and I think also serving as music critic.
This was during the Chicago break-in of Menagerie and Bill came to our suburban home to interview me. He was embarrassingly “impressed” by my burgeoning career as a playwright. It’s always lonely at home now: my friends have all dispersed. I mentioned this to Bill and he cordially invited me to his apartment near the river. We had a gala night among his friends. Later we attended the St. Louis Symphony together. He made my homecoming an exceptional pleasure.
When I returned to Menagerie in Chicago, Bill shortly arrived to attend and cover the play, and I believe he was sincerely overwhelmed by the play and fabulous Laurette, giving her last and greatest performance.
A year or two later I was back in St. Louis and we met again. He had now retired as journalist and was teaching English at Washington University, not far from our home, and was living in the sort of neo-Victorian white frame house that must have reminded him of his native Kansas. There, one evening, he shyly produced a play that he had written, Come Back, Little Sheba. He read it to me in his beautifully quiet and expressive voice; I was deeply moved by the play and I immediately wired Audrey Wood about it and urged him to submit it to her.
She was equally impressed and Bill became her client almost at once.
It was during the rehearsals of that play, starring Shirley Booth and the late Sidney Blackmer, that Bill had his first nervous crisis. The tension was too much for him, he assuaged it copiously with liquor. The legendary Paul Bigelow took him under charge and had him hospitalized and I don’t think Bill even attended his opening night.
Bill and his work were suffused with the light of humanity at its best. In each play there would be one dark scene and it was always the most powerful scene in the play: but he loved his characters, he wrote of them with a perfect ear for their homely speech, he saw them through their difficulties with the tenderness of a parent for suffering children: and they usually came out well.
Bill was a mystery as a person, and he remained one. Ever since he came to New York, probably even before, he found it difficult to open himself up to people, especially at social gatherings. He was inclined to silent moodiness: his face was prematurely etched with hidden sufferings: he would remain at a party rarely longer than half an hour: then he would say quietly, “I think I’d better go now.”
Because others were drinking and he couldn’t? Or because a shyness, a loneliness beyond comprehension except to a few such as Barbara Baxley, Elia Kazan and Miss Wood, was inextricably rooted in his being, despite the many years of analysis and the deserved fame and success?
His shyness was never awkward: he had true dignity and impeccable taste, rarely associated with “Middle America”: his apartment on the East River contained lovely paintings by “name” painters but reflecting his own taste. Interviews with him contained no touch of vulgarity: impersonal, perhaps, but impressively thoughtful and modest
Menagerie played till the middle of March in Chicago and by the time it got to New York many theatre people had stopped off to see Laurette in it and it had become a legend in New York before it arrived.
There was really little question that it would be well reviewed by everyone but my nemesis, the critic George Jean Nathan, who said that it hardly mattered except for
Laurette, and I am not sure that his feeling for Laurette was sincere, since he sent her a bottle of booze as a present on opening night in New York.
Laurette may or may not have been drinking, I never cared about that, but she wrote a thank-you note to Nathan: “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
Thank God she was happy that spring and apparently unaware that she was dying.
“I am kicking around the clouds,” she said in an interview.
She stayed with the play for a year and a half, sacrificing much of her personal comfort and health; she remained in the part that long because of a heroic perseverance I find as magnificent as her art itself. She died in December of 1946.
I was in Dick Orme’s house on St. Peter Street in New Orleans, the second-floor apartment. While I was at work one morning, he shouted up the air shaft, “Tennessee, it’s just come over the radio that Laurette Taylor is dead.”
I couldn’t respond.
After a few moments he then shouted this appalling one-liner: “I knew you’d be disappointed.”
6
After the success of Menagerie, as I’ve said before, I felt a great depression, probably because I never believed that anything would continue, would hold. I never thought my advance would maintain its ground. I always thought there would be a collapse immediately after the advance. Also, I had spent so much of my energy on the climb to success, that when I had “made it” and my play was “the hottest ticket in town,” I felt almost no satisfaction.
I remember one night I was in my room at the Algonquin. Audrey Wood, Bill Liebling, and Mother were there and I felt so tired that I stretched out on a sofa. Then suddenly I felt nauseated and I rushed to the bathroom to vomit.
Mother said, “Tom, you need a rest, come home for a while.”
But home was not where my heart was. I decided to go to Mexico, which I had enjoyed so much that summer of 1940. I went there by way of Dallas, where my dear friend Margo Jones, also the “late,” was putting on an early draft of Summer and Smoke in her arena theatre. Well, I thought the production was awful but I loved Margo and I pretended to like it. Soon afterward I took off for Mexico City on a train, passing through the Sierra Madre mountains, which were so lovely in those days, and taking up residence in Mexico City at an annex of the great Hotel Reforma.
I was lonely at first. But soon I met Leonard Bernstein, who was quite friendly to me. And then I met a rich man who gave strictly male parties in his apartment every Saturday night. And then I was lonely no more. The parties were really dances and at these Saturday night dances I learned how to “follow.” You see, the Mexicans always had that macho complex and I was also a rather short young man to be leading other young men, so I learned to follow quite well. It was a happy time, there, but I have never been a polygamous person when I could be otherwise, and I was happy to meet a young student, part Indian and extremely well formed in body and spirit, on a boulevard in the capital city. I was walking along when I heard these footsteps behind me, maintaining a close distance, so presently I looked back and I saw this darkly handsome boy and there were stone benches along El Paseo de la Reforma, so I sat down on one of those benches and the kid stopped and sat down beside me. I knew no Spanish and he knew little English but we spent that night in my room at the annex of the Reforma, a little hotel called the Lincoln, which didn’t mind a guest bringing in a guest.
The altitude of Mexico City gave me a sort of false animation and I wrote a great deal, including the short story “One Arm” and perhaps a bit more about Blanche, and I was very happy with the student. I have never liked hairy bodies, and, being half Indian, he was very smooth skinned and if I hadn’t been restless—who knows?
But then life is full of transient loves when you are young, even though you may long for the comfort of a lasting companion.
I remember taking a bus to Cuernavaca and stopping at a big hotel there which had a swimming pool, but after a swim, I walked about the town a bit and took a curious dislike to it which was so intense that, when I got back to my hotel, I inquired when the next bus would leave for Mexico City. Being told that none would go there until the next morning, I committed the first great extravagance of my life, I hired a taxi to drive me back. I remember how deliriously cool and fragrant with pine wood the air was through the open window of the taxi, how fast it drove and how I longed to resume my intimacy with the half-Indian student and the Saturday night dances.
I still believe that the open country of Mexico is the most beautiful I have seen in the world, and I have seen a great deal of the world.
A little anecdote of not much consequence:
One day Leonard Bernstein and I were both invited to lunch by a pair of very effete American queens. Bernstein was very hard on them and I was embarrassed by the way he insulted them.
“When the revolution comes,” he declared, “you will be stood up against a wall and shot.”
Bernstein has since been accused of something called “radical chic.” But looking back on that luncheon, I wonder if he is not as true a revolutionary as I am, the difference being I am not interested in shooting piss-elegant queens or anyone else, I am only interested in the discovery of a new social system—certainly not Communist, but an enlightened form of socialism, I would suppose.
That summer past me, I returned to New York, where rehearsals were about to begin on my collaborative effort with Donald Windham, a play called You Touched Me! based upon the short story by that title, written by one of my idols, D. H. Lawrence, whose widow had given us the rights to dramatize it some years before.
I feel a bit tired now and I’m going back to bed, here on Dumaine Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans.
I am working against time, and there is no reason to evade that issue, I mean to ignore the matter of time running out so rapidly.
I could, at this point, assume some sort of heroic posture but it would only be for self-satisfaction of a kind I despise, attributable to self-pity, a quality I find particularly abhorrent. My attitude toward myself has never been one of pity, thank God. I’ve got, to quote Leona Dawson in Small Craft Warnings, this terrible pride in my nature: if a person, whether a lovesick beautician like Leona or not, has pride in his nature, he is not about to indulge in the demeaning exercise of self-pity.
Speaking of demeaning exercises, this morning another one of those television companies, complete with commentator and crew, arrived at my place on Dumaine and set up in the patio for an interview with me. This time it was German television. The commentator was from Hamburg, one of my favorite resorts during the restless fifties. The crew was led with Wagnerian intensity by a very tall German lady named Ingrid. The commentator sat beneath a spreading banana tree which protected him from the rain while I had to sit out in the open getting drenched and answering all of those innocuous questions and pretending total ignorance of their reason for having come down here, which is, of course, the fact that they want to get some footage on the notorious American playwright, the queer one, whose decease will soon give him a moment of prominence in the media. Do you know how people are about things like that? Well, if you don’t, I can tell you. They love it. It quickens their blood. It makes them feel immortal.
Well, that is human, but I don’t think I am going to continue to perform for these visiting TV folks unless they come up with more interesting questions.
Now only a few weeks back, when I was at my home in New Orleans, the Canadian Broadcasting Company sent a commentator and a crew down there. Basically, it was for the same reason, to get some footage on the notorious playwright, addicted to dope and all that. The commentator was Harry Rasky and Harry and I got along fine together despite the fact there was no direct allusion on his part to the object of his pilgrimage. I was not feeling much better, then, than I am feeling today, and it was just as hot then as it is now and we had to walk about the streets of the Quarter while Harry interviewed me and I was drenched on that occasion with sweat instead of rain. But so was Harry. H
e did not sit under a sheltering banana tree.
Then there was the Austrian company last spring in Key West. They were very nice, indeed, and I did not have to leave the vicinity of my pool and patio. Viola Veidt was there. She speaks perfect German, being the daughter of the late Conrad Veidt. They wanted me to say something in German (since I am one-quarter Hun) but I know very little of that language besides auf Wiedersehen and it was not yet time to say good-by, so Viola whispered to me, “Say Ficken ist gesund.” That means, “Fucking is healthy.” Well, I said it to them and they were very amused, it was the sort of remark that I was expected to make. They said it would not be used by the Austrian stations, but if they released the show in Germany, the remark would be left in.
Yesterday’s commentator from Hamburg was obviously disconcerted when I cut through the prepared questions to talk about the atrocity of the American involvement in Vietnam, about Nixon’s total lack of honesty and of a moral sense, and of the devotion I had to the cause of Senator McGovern.
On the subject of television shows, I was living, at a point in the sixties, in a high-rise apartment building adjoining the Dakota Apartments on West Seventy-second Street, in New York City. I was at that time under drugs, rather deeply, and did not know, when I got up one morning, that I had previously acquiesced, perhaps involuntarily, to a request by the TV commentator Mike Wallace to interview me in my apartment that morning.
Out I came stumbling in a pair of shorts from my bedroom with the twin beds, one never occupied. I entered the blaze of television cameras in the big front room of the thirty-third-story apartment. A full TV crew had been set up and there was Mike Wallace, an old friend of mine, staring at me with a blend of dismay and chagrin and God knows what else. I fell down flat on my face. I had a habit of doing that in the sixties. They picked me up. Somebody put a robe on me. Then Mike Wallace began asking me things. I don’t remember what. I simply remember that I sat there in a blank silence and that after about fifteen minutes Mike turned sadly to the crew and said, “Pack up, we’re not going to get anything.”