After some understandable hesitation, I opened the door and there was a theatre friend and a lady friend whom I recognized but whose name I will not mention except to say that she was not his wife.
“Jesus, it’s cold in here,” he observed, and he and the young lady went immediately to bed—for the sole purpose of keeping warm, I suppose. The circus roustabout and I sat by the fireplace as if meditating and before long the room was filled with cries of hysterical excitement from the young lady whose name I have omitted. Afterward we all sat before the fire and had drinks and there was no embarrassment among us.
When the couple had departed, the kid and I replaced them in bed and I must say that we were much quieter though I believe that my sensations were equally ecstatic. The kid stayed with me for a couple of days and nights, then his circus left town and I was alone again.
Shortly after the blizzard I bought passage on a ship to Europe, the America, and it was Christmas time and I had bought and decorated a big tree in the flat and I gave a big party. The room could hardly hold the guests. Perhaps the two stars of the evening were Greta Garbo and Helen Hayes.
Garbo made a terrific impression, she was radiantly beautiful. Only a few weeks ago I happened to pass her on the street, unknowingly. My companion said, “That lady we just passed was Garbo.” I spun around and rushed up to her. True, the lovely face had aged but the beauty was still there. And also the terrible shyness. She was gracious but frightened. I informed her that I was appearing that evening in my own play, Small Craft Warnings, and invited her to come as my guest. It was a stupid invitation to offer Garbo but she declined it with grace. “How wonderful. Thank you: I don’t go out anymore.”
Then she rushed on.
I believe I have had five meetings with Garbo and one occurred during that December of 1947 when Streetcar had just opened in New York. I happened to tell George Cukor that I had written a screenplay called The Pink Bedroom. Cukor was a dear friend of Garbo’s and he said, “I want you to show it to Garbo. I’ll arrange for her to see you.”
To my surprise the fabulous lady received me alone in her apartment at the Ritz Tower.
We sat in the parlor drinking schnapps. I got a big high and I began to tell her the story of The Pink Bedroom. There was something about her curious and androgynous beauty that inspired me out of my characteristic timidity. I told her the story and she kept whispering, “Wonderful!” leaning toward me with a look of entrancement in her eyes. I thought to myself, She will do it, she’ll return to the screen! After an hour, when I had finished telling the scenario, she still said, “Wonderful!” But then she sighed and leaned back on her sofa. “Yes, it’s wonderful, but not for me. Give it to Joan Crawford.”
The second occasion when I saw Garbo was about five years later, I’d guess, when I was invited to a little party given by that fabulous old character actress, Constance Collier. Garbo was there and I approached her and said, “You are the only great tragedienne that the screen ever had, you’ve got to resume your career!”
Garbo jumped up and exclaimed, “This room is stifling!” She rushed across to a window, threw it all the way up as if about to leap out and stood there with her back to us for several minutes.
The old character actress leaned toward me gravely and said in a whisper, “Never speak to her of acting again. She always goes into a fit at the suggestion.”
How sad a thing for an artist to abandon his art: I think it’s much sadder than death …
There must have been something about her screen career that profoundly revolted her—in Hollywood, I mean. And so she turned into an imperishable legend and we are left with her Camille and her Anna Karenina and the vibrations of that marvelous voice that surely must have been as great as Duse’s.
At the end of that December, no longer able to cope with the unremitting publicity in New York, I sailed for Europe.
I was not at all seasick but I felt strangely unwell and I was unable to write.
Being unable to write has always disturbed me as if the sky had fallen upon my head.
I arrived in Cherbourg and then in Paris.
I had asked Garbo where to stay in Paris and the dear lady had said, “Try the George V.” I didn’t see how Garbo could be mistaken so it was there I went. I never hated a hotel quite so much in a life full of rented rooms.
So the next day I moved to a hotel on the Left Bank called the Lutetia. This was more to my liking, although it was almost totally unheated. I was still being pursued by the press. And I was less and less well, due to the lack of good food in Europe during the early postwar years. I was, however, distinctly pleased by the night life which I was quick to discover. I went continually to the Boeuf sur le Toit and to Madame Arthur’s, the latter having a very effective drag-show.
During the day I stayed mostly in the enormous bathtub at the Lutetia. They had no heat in the radiators but for some reason they had plenty of hot water. I received the press in the bathtub. I guess a part of me has always wanted to receive the press, under any circumstances. The door kept ringing with requests for interviews. I would get out of the bathtub, shivering in one of those great wrap-about towels.
“Montez, s’il vous plaît, Chambre numéro—”
Then I would leave the door slightly ajar and plunge back into the enormous, steaming bathtub.
I suppose I must have received a dreadful press in Paris but I never read it. I was too preoccupied with the nocturnal pleasures which the city of lights had to offer.
Even so, each morning I felt sicker. One could not get real milk in Paris at that time, only powdered milk, and the food was wretched. I drank a lot of cognac.
All at once I felt desperately ill and I went to the American Hospital in Neuilly.
The doctors informed me that I was “threatened with hepatitis and mononucleosis.” I had never heard of either of those disorders and they were not explained to me by the doctors. In my journal I wrote: “The jig is up.”
On the boat coming to Europe I had met a charming young lady whose father and mother were both eminent French journalists. The father, M. Lazareff, was the owner of two Paris papers, Paris Jour and Paris Soir, and the mother, Mme. Lazareff, was the editor of the fashion magazine Elle.
It was Mme. Lazareff who came to see me in the American Hospital, where I was expecting the arrival of the reaper.
“Get out of bed at once,” she ordered. “I am taking you home, giving you a good dinner, and seeing you off on a train for the South of France.”
She dispatched me to an inn called La Colombe d’Or, where her daughter was staying. It was a place frequented mostly by artists and writers and it was in the town of Vence, where D. H. Lawrence had died. Snow white doves were fluttering and cooing all about—and they made me unhappy. I stayed there only a couple of days and then went south to Italy. As soon as I crossed the Italian border my health and life seemed to be magically restored. There was the sun and there were the smiling Italians.
In Rome I took a two-room furnished apartment on Via Aurora, just off Via Veneto. It was in one of those tawny old high-ceilinged buildings that are characteristic of Vecchia Roma though it was not situated in that part of the city. It was only a block from the entrance to the great park called Villa Borghese. Both the park and the boulevard, Via Veneto, I was soon to discover, were favorite resorts for the sort of chance acquaintances that a lonely foreigner is apt to be seeking. This was still soon after World War II, and the dollar was very high.
A cynical old American journalist whom I met soon after my arrival said to me, “Rome is a city of thieves, mendicants and prostitutes, both male and female.” The prevalence of prostitution was undeniable and not to the disadvantage of the cynical journalist who shared my sexual interests but was considerably more callous in his indulgence of that taste.
There were mendicants in Rome: there are beggars wherever there is a great deal of economic distress. You find more of them, actually, in certain parts of New York than you would have fou
nd in Rome twenty-five years ago, and certainly there are far more thieves in American cities. I never encountered a thief in Rome in those days, nor did I ever encounter violence or a threat of it. The Italians are not much inclined toward thievery or violence, it seems to me it goes rather against their nature.
As for prostitution, that is really the world’s oldest profession in all Mediterranean countries with the possible exception of Spain. It is due largely to their physical beauty and to their warmth of blood, their natural eroticism. In Rome you rarely see a young man on the street who does not have a slight erection. Often they walk along the Veneto with hand in pocket, caressing their genitals quite unconsciously, and this regardless of whether or not they are hustling or cruising. They are raised without any of our puritanical reserves about sex. Young American males, even when they are good-looking, do not think of themselves as sexually desirable. Good-looking young Italians never think of themselves as anything else. And they are rarely mistaken. That is a matter that I dealt with pretty thoroughly in my longest piece of fiction, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone.
I made many friends very quickly in Rome: the American journalist’s social contacts were all but limitless both in high and low strata of Roman society. I met through him most of the early tide of film people from the States. I met Luchino Visconti, who had already directed Zoo de Vetro in Italy and was soon to direct Un Tramway che se chiamo Desiderio. He remains one of the world’s greatest directors for stage and screen and his intimate friend and early assistant Franco Zeffirelli has achieved an almost equal stature, especially in his enchanting film, Romeo and Juliet.
That winter Visconti was directing a film in Sicily called La Terra Trema (“The Earth Trembles”), which I think is still very likely his greatest work for the screen, although it is perhaps the least known. The American journalist and I flew down to Catania, near which Visconti was shooting—the location was a suburb called Acitrezza. There I met both Visconti and Zeffirelli, who was at that time a very handsome blond Florentine youth.
Although an aristocrat of great inherited wealth, Visconti was an avowed Communist at this time. I think it is only in the case of Brecht that a man’s politics, if the man is an artist, are of particular importance in his work; his degrees of talent and of humanity are what count. I also feel that an artist’s sexual predilections or deviations are not usually pertinent to the value of his work. Of interest, certainly. Only a homosexual could have written Remembrance of Things Past.
My apartment consisted of two rooms, a comfortably furnished living room, which was pleasant mainly because of the huge windows looking out upon the sun-drenched street and the old wall of Rome, which surrounds the Villa Borghese. I kept the room full of mimosa that winter. The other room, the bedroom, was furnished almost entirely with a huge letto matrimoniale. This room also had huge shuttered windows filled by day with sky and sun. It was a golden winter, the warmest I’ve known in Rome.
There were no privations in Rome, then, for a reasonably affluent tourist. The food at even the simplest trattorias was excellent and the wine of Rome, Frascati, had an incomparable mellowness. After a mezzo-litro you felt as if a new kind of blood had been transfused into your arteries, a blood that swept away all anxiety and all tension for a while, and for a while is the stuff that dreams are made of.
Italians take three or four hours off for lunch (because of the wine-drinking, I suppose, and the climate), and after they’ve dined they go straight to bed for a siesta. And if you were young, the siesta was usually not alone, certainly not when you occupied a letto matrimoniale and had great windows that opened directly upon the street, and knew a few little phrases like “Dove vai?” (“Where are you going?”). My cynical American journalist told me that I needed to know only two Italian phrases to enjoy myself in Rome, “Dove vai?” and “Quanto costa?” (“What’s your price?”).
But I was not long in picking up most of the language. I can speak it fluently—well, rather fluently—when I’m in Italy, which I wish was all the time, even now when it has changed so drastically.
On the second night I spent in Rome, I happened to be on the Via Veneto and I strolled by the windows of Doney’s, a famous patisserie on the street floor of the Hotel Excelsior. I stopped short, my eyes encountering those of a youth who appeared to be a young faun in a dilapidated old overcoat, seated alone at a table from which he could smile at strangers on the street.
We smiled at each other and I made a motion to invite him outside. He came out promptly. It was no use saying, “Dove vai?” and it was not yet time to ask, “Quanto?”—but I was sure it soon would be …
I had not yet moved into the apartment on Via Aurora, I was still in a room across the street at the Hotel Ambasciatore. The hotel was one of the most prominent in Rome and it was still trying to maintain a respectable front, so when I entered with my adolescent acquaintance in his worn-out coat and his shoes that were tied to his feet, the staff in the lobby looked dumb-struck. I took the youth, whom I’ll call Rafaello, directly to the elevator, wondering whether or not the operator would be permitted to let us enter. There were, indeed, some long moments of hesitation and Rafaello was pale and trembling, he had never entered a grand hotel before in his seventeen years.
I think I handed the elevator man a few hundred lire: then the old apparatus cranked into immediate action and we were delivered to a floor at the top of the building. I had a nice room there. I remember that it had a pink-shaded bedside lamp. I had acquired a pocket dictionary of English-Italian. I began to look up words furiously as the youth sat on one single bed and I on the other. We smiled and smiled at each other, but he kept shaking his head when I managed, through the dictionary, to invite him to pass the night with me at the grand Hotel Ambasciatore. He kept pointing to the word for Papa. It seems that his father was a carabiniere who punished the youth, when he stayed out nights, by tying him up in a chair in the basement for the whole next day without food or water. Then Rafaello, with the apologetically piquant gestures of a geisha, pointed out to me the word domani, which means “tomorrow”: I felt dreadfully put down. Tomorrow seemed an interminable period to wait, for I had never seen a boy who attracted me so desperately since Kip. Or should I say appealed to me so deeply.
Well, my Italian lessons had begun. And I had a sleepless or nearly sleepless night.
A rendezvous was arranged for the next evening at the same place, Doney’s, for I had already found the apartment on Via Aurora and was to move into it the next day.
Is it possible to be a dirty old man in your middle thirties? I seem to be giving that impression.
This book is a sort of catharsis of puritanical guilt-feelings, I suppose. “All good art is an indiscretion.” Well, I can’t assure you that this book will be art, but it is bound to be an indiscretion, since it deals with my adult life …
Of course, I could devote this whole book to a discussion of the art of drama, but wouldn’t that be a bore?
It would bore me to extinction, I’m afraid, and it would be a very, very short book, about three sentences to the page with extremely wide margins. The plays speak for themselves.
Life that winter in Rome: a golden dream, and I don’t mean just Rafaello and the mimosa and the total freedom of life. Stop there: What I do mean is the total freedom of life and Rafaello and the mimosa, and the letto matrimoniale and the Frascati when morning work was over.
I had arranged things very well for myself. I had a little bedside buzzer and when I woke up with Rafaello still asleep beside me I would press it. The padrona was a lovely lady named Mariella. She would knock at the door and I would order breakfasts. Eggs and bacon and toast for Rafaello—for me just caffè latte.
Rafaello was now outfitted with a new suit, a new coat, and with new shoes and he was no longer living at home under the dominion of the fiendish father. Every other night he spent with me, the other nights at a little pensione.
My friends would ask me, “Is this Rafaello’s night?”—or
was I going to cruise with them … ?
I remember that one morning I received a lady journalist when Rafaello and I had just gotten out of bed. I received her in my dressing-gown in the living room: Rafaello sat quietly in the corner eating his eggs and bacon and toast.
A day or two later there was a headline in a Roman paper that read: “La Primavera Romana di Tennessee Williams,” and it mentioned the “giovane” in the corner eating breakfast—and I was at once launched upon a long period of personal notoriety in Rome which doubtless persists to this day.
The landlady, Mariella, thought that I was a lunatic because, in those days, I used to compose dialogue out loud, pacing the floor with a coffee cup in my hand.
I still talk aloud when I write dialogue for a play: it helps me to know how it is going to sound from the stage.
A line from Camino Real: I mean two lines from the play:
Casanova to Camille: “My dear, you must learn how to carry the banner of Bohemia into the enemy camp.”
Camille to Casanova: “Bohemia has no banner, it survives by discretion.”
It is now twenty minutes past three but I shall go on writing till it is milking-time for the cow, if there are cows in New Orleans.
This week alone I received several appeals for financial assistance. One came from a beautiful young hustler in Manhattan. He wanted two hundred bucks to go abroad.
Another was from a friend who wanted me to send him sixty bucks to blow up a picture of me and Dave Dellinger.
Right now I am in no position, economically or even spiritually, to gratify the requests of those who regard me only as a source of supplementary income.
I have never been able to obtain any kind of medical insurance, I have to pay all my own medical and surgical bills, and it has been three months since I’ve had the courage to open my accountant’s monthly statement on my financial status.
I need friends very badly but even at sixty-one I don’t want to buy them. Temporarily at least I feel like old Flora Goforth: “The milk train doesn’t stop here anymore.”