The early autumn of 1946, the production of You Touched Me!, put on by Guthrie McClintic and a fine cast of players, went not too well. In the cast was the young Monty Clift and he was at the time the most promising young actor on Broadway, this being a couple of years before the astonishing advent of Brando, which I suspect had much to do with the long and dreadful crack-up of dear Monty. I haven’t seen or read You Touched Me! since 1946 and as far as I know it has never been produced anywhere again, which is unfortunate for it had some very funny and, also, some very touching scenes in it. That wonderful old character actor with the bulldog face, Edmund Gwenn, told a very funny story, in the play, about his affair with a female porpoise. Also in the cast was an Irish actor of the same vintage, Neil Fitzgerald, playing a parson and there was a hilarious scene in which he proposed marriage to the spinster proprietress of the pottery.
At the back of the house, when the opening night curtain had dropped to unenthusiastic applause, stood little Audrey Wood Liebling. As I filed out of the theatre with crestfallen Windham, my collaborator, she said in a sort of crooked-mouth whisper, “Mixed notices, dear.” And right she was, the notices were very mixed.
In those days, however, a play could run for several months on mixed notices, and it seems to me that You Touched Me! played through the fall season.
I had been introduced to two lovers in 1939 by Harold Vinal, editor of Voices. He was living at the Hotel Winslow on Madison, he had a tiny room with a double-decker bunk and he had invited me over, having published a sequence of my lyrics.
He invited me to meet a pair of “delightful Georgia boys” who were living on Fifty-second Street in conditions close to starvation.
The prospect pleased me so off we went to West Fifty-second, the block of it known in those days as “Tin Pan Alley.” The street floor din was frightful but “the boys” had a sparsely furnished room on the second floor, it was a walk-up.
I had no sooner seen one of these boys, with his great dreamy eyes and willowy figure, than I thought, Baby this one’s for you.
We all started dancing to a band that was playing directly below their room and I no sooner had him in my arms for the ostensible motive of dancing than I began to kiss him and paste my pelvis to his.
His companion sat down gloomily and menacingly in a corner. A young man of Cherokee or Choctaw extraction broke in on my partner and me and he took me as his partner; he told me that I must relinquish my amorous advances on “Dreamy Eyes” at once, as his companion was extremely, dangerously jealous.
I had not yet dug the turnabout nature of homosexual attachments. I was an honorable young queer so I turned my attentions immediately upon the Indian.
The party broke up and the Indian offered to see me home to the “Y”
“Oh, thanks,” I said, “I am new in town and can’t get about alone.”
I sublimated my attraction to Dreamy Eyes and we became close buddies. We soon were cruising together, mostly about Times Square. One night we were approached by two sailors outside the Cross-roads Inn after midnight. It so happened that my friend had booked a room at the Claridge Hotel because the painter with whom he stayed had an overnight guest.
Well! It was a night to remember but not for romantic reasons. I was somewhat suspicious and not very intrigued when the sailors insisted that we enter separately, my friend and I going straight up to the room and the sailors following later.
I was far from enchanted by the brutal sex-bit. When it was completed, the sailors abruptly ripped the telephone cord from the wall. Then they stood me against the wall while they beat up my friend, knocking out a few teeth. Then they stood him against the wall with a switch-blade knife while they beat me up.
My upper teeth cut through my lower lip.
The violence, the terror, deprived me of my senses. My friend got me back to the “Y,” but I was in a state of fantasy, totally out of my skull.
At the “Y,” a sympathetic young doctor stitched my lip.
Thus ended for quite awhile our Times Square cruising together. I wonder if its chief attraction was not our companionship, our being together?
I shall never retract my statement of my sublimated love for this friend, and why should I? Time doesn’t take away from true friendship, nor does separation.
I recall a “truth game” at Tallulah’s mansion in Coconut Grove, in the 1950’s, where her assault upon the part of Blanche was in preparation. During this truth game, when it came the turn of a friend of my old friend Dreamy Eyes to demand truth about the circle of players, he asked me why I had stopped caring for that boy.
I said to him, “Baby, both of us found lovers. He found you and I found Frankie—and we were both so absorbed in our loves that we neglected our friendship.”
About the time that You Touched Me! opened on Broadway in 1946 I began to feel as if I were going into a physical decline, as indeed I was, it turned out. Nevertheless I was having a good time, socially and sexually. I had a suite on the eighteenth floor of the Hotel Shelton. My room overlooked the East River and there was a good swimming pool and a steam room downstairs and so I had my favorite exercise, swimming, and I also had access to a lot of attractive chance acquaintances whose acquaintanceship I struck up mostly in the steam room. Being surrounded by moist vapor, a cloud of it, used to be a sexual excitant to me. Now I find it obnoxious but in those days, well, I was still presentable with my clothes off and many other patrons of the Shelton pool and steam room were quite lovely. Entertainments were continual, afternoon and evening. At this time an old friend of mine was in New York and his successful activities in the steam room were quite phenomenal. After almost every session in that retreat of moist vapor he would come up to my suite with a congenial young man and it got so that the house dick would follow him up to the suite to see where he was going, and make continual notes upon it.
I eventually noticed that I had begun to receive sour and disparaging looks from the management of the hotel, but this did not disturb me much for I had never gotten along well with managements or landladies, I mean not during my emancipated years.
62. A travel-scarred photo of Kip.
63. About to ride to Mexico from the squab ranch in Hawthorne, California, during the summer of 1939.
64. With Irene Selznick and Elia Kazan during a break in the rehearsals for Streetcar.
65. Frank Merlo, Elia Kazan, Tennessee, Charles Feldman during film production of Streetcar.
66. Chris Isherwood in Santa Monica.
67. With Maria at a party in Rome.
68. On the Lido with Maria.
69. One of the exits Carson and I took together—Audrey Wood, Carson McCullers and me at the party after the Broadway opening of Summer and Smoke.
70. With Sam Goldwyn, Jr., and Carson McCullers, in Key West during the 1950’s.
71. With Irene Selznick (left) and Margo Jones, at the time of Summer and Smoke, 1953.
72. Jane and Paul Bowles, my friends, on a lovely coast of Morocco.
73. With wonderful Tallulah, during a rehearsal for the revival of Streetcar in 1955.
74. With Donald Windham at the Houston airport. I was about to direct his play, The Starless Air.
75. Donald Windham, my collaborator on You Touched Me! in 1946, and an early friend in New York, whose present disaffection I much regret.
76. Anna Magnani and me, aboard the Andrea Doria. She was about to star in The Rose Tattoo.
So things went gaily along until sometime in early December when it was no longer mistakable that my health was failing. And so I gave up my suite at the Shelton and I went down to New Orleans before the Christmas season, to live a quiet life, as the doctor advised. I was still, at this time, relatively affluent and I put up in a rather plush hotel, the Pontchartrain, on the edge of the Garden District. I remember writing one of my favorite one-act plays there: it was called The Unsatisfactory Supper and I don’t know why it is so seldom produced for it is very funny.
But I was alone there
and lonely and I began to look at advertisements for furnished apartments in Vieux Carré, where I had lived on previous stays in New Orleans. I was so fortunate as to discover a lovely furnished apartment on Orleans Street half a block from the rear of St. Louis cathedral. It had a lovely gallery and sitting out there on that gallery I could see in the garden behind the cathedral the great stone statue of Christ, his arms outstretched as if to invite the suffering world to come to Him.
That season in New Orleans I did not live alone but with a friend. (Due to the uncompromisingly honest nature of these memoirs, which may be their principal virtue, a number of friends prefer not to have their names linked to mine in this story of my life. I understand and respect this preference. I could invent them as characters the way one might in a piece of fiction, making them different from themselves, but that would violate the first premise of this book; and so I’d rather omit them completely, however regrettable a gap that makes in a work which is a stage for all the dramatis personae of my past life who were of importance to me. It may be that some of them will be contented with the omission of certain details that I found endearingly colorful but that offend their present sensibilities. In any case, I’ll omit the name of the friend about whom I’ll now write.)
As to this particular friend who occupied the center of my life from the late fall of 1946 till at least half a year later, and who continues to be among the closest of my friends, let me only say, now, that he relieved me, during that period, of my greatest affliction, which is perhaps the major theme of my writings, the affliction of loneliness that follows me like my shadow, a very ponderous shadow too heavy to drag after me all of my days and nights …
At first I lived a very reclusive life for a resident of New Orleans, that gregarious city. I reduced my activities mostly to that of writing. At first it was difficult, the work didn’t seem to have the old impetus to it. I felt as if I had in my organic system some debilitating poison. I had to conserve my energy.
Eventually that season I was entertained a good deal by the elite New Orleans society which in those days resided mainly, if not entirely, on the far side of Canal Street, in what is called the Garden District.
One evening I decided that I felt well enough to give my socially elite friends a party in my little apartment on Orleans Street. Probably some of the young debutantes had never before entered an apartment in the Vieux Carré unless it were in the Pontalba buildings that were on Jackson Square, the only “respectable” dwellings in the Quarter. I mean recognized as such by the Garden District mothers.
My party was a curious occasion.
I remember a young debutante inquiring if she could see my bedroom.
“Why not? It’s very nice.”
“He’s going to show us his bedroom!” exclaimed the young lady.
The whole party trooped in.
They seemed to like the bedroom. Who wouldn’t? A bedroom is either the loveliest room of a place of residence or the most abhorrent: this one belonged to the first category.
Then somebody turned to my apartment mate.
“Now show us yours.”
“Oh, I–”
He probably knew that a scandal was brewing and would have wished to avoid it but I found it perfectly natural to say, ‘We share this room.’
I thought the silence that followed my statement was not natural at all.
You see, the bed was somewhere between single and double …
Debutantes began to whisper to their escorts, there were little secretive colloquies among them and presently they began to thank us for an unusual and delightful evening and to take their leave as though a storm were impending.
I suppose it was better that way. My place in society, then and possibly always since then, has been in Bohemia. I love to visit the other side now and then, but on my social passport Bohemia is indelibly stamped, without regret on my part.
I neglected to mention an extraordinary incident which occurred just following the somewhat precipitate dissolution of the party.
About half an hour after the escorted debutantes had taken to their heels and my friend and I were about to retire, there came a short, nervous rap at the door. I threw on my dressing gown and opened the door upon the handsomest of the young men who had attended our party. He wore only a raincoat and immediately after the door was opened for him, he flung his coat off, rushed into the bedroom and fell sobbing drunkenly on the bed.
“At last a little truth and they couldn’t take it,” he kept saying, until we put him to sleep.
In the morning he explained that for some reason, obscure to him and certainly to us, he had undressed downstairs in his car and returned to our apartment with just the waterproof coat buckled about him.
Such are the flowers called immortelles:
They are meant to be kept under crystal bells.
The physical lethargy which had begun to trouble me that season increasingly affected my writing, the work didn’t seem to go with its usual élan vital. I suffered a strange lassitude. I would get up in the morning and drink my strong black coffee as before but my energy did not respond. All that I distinctly remember writing that time in the French Quarter was a strange little play called Ten Blocks on the Camino Real. I sent it to Audrey Wood and I waited several weeks before I got from her an acknowledgment that she had received it. The acknowledgment was of a peculiar nature. I was having dinner in a restaurant when I was called to the phone. It was Audrey calling me from New York.
“About that play you sent me,” she said stridently, “put it away, don’t let anybody see it.”
I don’t think Audrey ever realized how subject I was to depression about my work or surely she would not have acknowledged the play in that particular fashion. But agents live in a different world from the artists they represent. They are often very good at making deals but they are sometimes very obtuse in their recognition of an original and striking piece of work in its early stages. I am afraid that her phone call may have prevented me from making a very, very beautiful play out of Camino Real instead of the striking but flawed piece which it finally turned into several years later.
Please remember at this point that I am quite capable of being unfair. I am not unfair by intention. But my work—I don’t think anyone has ever known, with the exception of Elia Kazan, how desperately much it meant to me and accordingly treated it—or should I say its writer—with the necessary sympathy of feeling.
In the spring of 1946, a great deal happened to me of a most upsetting nature, which I will deal with directly and simply.
It was becoming oppressively warm in New Orleans in early May. I began to think of the cool plateau of New Mexico where I had met Frieda Lawrence and Dorothy Brett and Spuds Johnston and Witter Bynner, and where I’d begun a play about Lawrence, while reading his collected letters, edited by Aldous Huxley. I think those letters are the greatest of Lawrence’s work and I’ll never forget the last one. It was a one-liner and it referred to the sanitarium in which he died: “This place no good.” He was too weak to write anymore. And I remember Frieda’s account of his death in her beautiful, unsentimental memoir of her life with him. As he lay dying, he finally said, “I think it’s time for morphine.”
I decided to go back to Taos and see those Lawrence people again and to breathe the fine mountain air. But, alas, I decided to return there by car while my friend preceded me by train. I went to a secondhand car lot and some shifty-eyed salesman, perhaps a relative of a recent President, sold me a lemon. It was a newly painted black Packard convertible. It looked great. But I was only halfway up the Mississippi Delta, intending to pass through St. Louis for a brief visit with my family, when it broke down for the first time. The water boiled out of the radiator and it stalled on the highway. I got the radiator repaired and continued on to St. Louis. I remember that Dad came out to look at my sporty vehicle and he shook his head dubiously. “It doesn’t look to me like a solid piece of goods,” he remarked. And right he was. But what happe
ned in St. Louis was that late one night, after an attack of diarrhea, I felt a stabbing pain in my abdomen.
I was really in an alarming condition, but I had made up my mind to continue my trip to Taos the next morning, so I made no mention of the severe pain but hit the road after breakfast.
The pain continued, with varying degrees of ferocity, all the next day and night. Then, when I was just outside of a town in Oklahoma, something under the hood of the car began to rattle more and more loudly and the car came to a slow halt and refused to start up again.
I hitched a ride into town and went to a garage where I directed a mechanic to pick up the car and haul it in for repair.
Then I checked into one of the hotels. My pains were now not only severe but peculiarly located. Whenever I took a step, I had a shooting stab of pain down the urethra and it was by far the most severe pain I had ever experienced. I got hold of a local doctor who said that I probably had acute appendicitis and that the appendix was probably in an unusual position so that it caused the pain to shoot down my penis. He said that I ought to go at once to a hospital in Wichita, Kansas.