“Play it? Honey, don’t play it, just feel it.”
Naturally the performer would go away from Margo as perplexed as when he approached her.
It was not until a year or two later that I learned that Margo had informed the cast, in a reverential tone, that this play was the final work of a dying playwright. The young Anne Jackson was in the cast and it seems that she told this story to Truman Capote. It got back to me the following summer in Italy and it caused me a great deal of consternation. I did not like to be reminded that my apparent good health was so profoundly suspect.
Well, the play opened as plays usually did in those days, and it got another rave notice from Atkinson, but none from anyone else. Obviously it was doomed. The performers were not feeling it nor were they performing it very well, either. Of course Miss Phillips was as effective as she could be with the kind of direction that she had been given. Mr. Andrews looked handsome.
Streetcar was still running to packed houses and even Summer and Smoke was packed for the first weeks. But word got around and pretty soon attendance dropped off. I remember standing in the back of the house and being unable to watch or listen for more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time.
Only my lovely apartment kept me from despair for a while. That and, of course, the unfailing work each morning on some new project, story, poem, or play.
Why do I resist writing about my plays? The truth is that my plays have been the most important element of my life for God knows how many years. But I feel the plays speak for themselves. And that my life hasn’t and that it has been remarkable enough, in its continual contest with madness, to be worth setting upon paper. And my habits of work are so much more private than my daily and nightly existence.
One evening I was passing along Lexington Avenue when I encountered, leaning against a wall near a corner, a very young man with carrot-red hair and the sort of figure that every hustler should have but rarely does, now or then. I stopped short in my tracks and said, “Hello.” He grinned amiably and moved out from the wall, extending his hand to me.
“My name is Tommy Williams,” he said.
This is, of course, my own real name and it struck me as an irresistibly good omen so I took him straight home to the lovely apartment and it was a night when the nightingales sang. Redheads have that wonderful skin, almost translucent and full of pearly tints.
Enough about that.
Tommy was inexperienced as a hustler and would not, as we say, “turn over.” However, one evening, when I had more or less allowed that contact to lapse, I saw him on the same corner where we’d originally met and he smiled at me sheepishly and he said, “Mr. Williams, if you’d like to, you can bugger me tonight.”
Pathetic, maybe, but it was very touching.
9
In the early fall of 1948, I had a quite sudden and accidental and marvelous re-encounter with Frank Phillip Merlo.
It came about this way. I was once again, near midnight, walking downtown on Lexington, taking the night air, when I passed an open delicatessen. In there buying some edibles was “The Little Horse” with a wartime buddy of his.
“My God, Frankie, why haven’t you looked me up?”
“I don’t like to climb on band-wagons,” was his characteristically direct and honest reply. “When you hit it big with Streetcar last year, I figured you’d think I just wanted to exploit a little meeting we’d had on a beach. That’s why I never got in touch with you. But I saw the play and I loved it.”
“Let’s have a picnic at my place,” I suggested. Frankie looked at his buddy (who was a straight) and his buddy nodded.
We went back to the Aquarius apartment and ate roast beef on rye with pickles and potato salad. Frankie and I kept looking at each other.
Frankie didn’t know that his buddy knew. But his buddy did know and couldn’t have cared less. Nobody who knew Frankie would allow anything like being one for the boys, not the girls, to matter in his friendship with “The Horse.”
So presently the Navy buddy said, “Frankie, why don’t you stay here with Tennessee and I’ll go home to Jersey?”
Well, that’s how it began to work out. Frankie stayed over with Tennessee, on that magical carpet of a bed back of the submarine garden. Some years later I wrote up this event in a poem called “A Separate Poem.”
I did not really fall in love with Frankie all at once. In fact at first I was hesitant to make it a permanent thing. I was too used to having freedom. So one evening, with all possible delicacy, I told him that instead of staying every night it would be better if he made it every other night; the old Rafaello arrangement.
This was doubtless interpreted negatively by Frankie, and I think it hurt his feelings. In any case, this partial commitment to the romance was soon to be complete.
I went to St. Louis to see Mother. And it was while I was there under the maternal roof that it became unmistakably clear to me that my heart, too long accustomed to transitory attachments, had found in the young Sicilian a home at last.
I sent him a wire from St. Louis: “Returning New York tomorrow. Please wait for me in apartment.”
I returned after midnight. When I let myself into the apartment it seemed totally empty, there was no evidence of Frankie’s presence and I felt quite desolate. But that feeling persisted only for the time it took me to enter the Aquarius bedroom. There on the huge bed was little Frankie, sleeping.
So began a relationship that lasted for fourteen years.
Now I’ll describe the lunatic events of last night. I was scheduled to make two appearances at the New Theatre for my resumed “symposia” after the performance. The first was to be at 9:10, after the first Saturday evening show, the second at 12:10 after the second. I was intending, out of sheer madness, I suppose, to read my new story which I call my last one, “The Inventory at Fontana Belle.”
Well, the audience at the early show last night was spared that experience by a seriocomic concomitance of misadventures.
I had a dinner date with Ruth Ford and Dotson Rader set up for 7:30. I was also, at the same hour, expecting my new friend, who was to join us for dinner. Dotson left messages for me to call Ruth. I did and it was apparent that she was the opposite of eager to keep the date. She said that Dotson was now incommunicado, locked in the little attic apartment, the eyrie, in which she has lately ensconced him. I told her that my friend and I would go to Billy Barnes’s for a picnic on his terrace and that she and Dotson might join us if they felt so inclined. Well, they didn’t. And I felt put down about that. And there were bad vibes in the air on Billy’s penthouse terrace. There were several young male beauties present and they started disappearing together, as is the wont of the beautiful and young in the States. Billy became more and more distraught in appearance. Mr. Robert Fryer of the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles, where they plan to revive Streetcar this winter in celebration of its twenty-fifth anniversary, did not help the situation. He seemed extremely cool and quite lacking in social charm and not at all amused by my efforts to be amusing. I began to feel strange, partly due to a vodka martini and two or three glasses of red wine.
It seems that I can’t hold liquor anymore; consult my liver on that subject and perhaps also my brain.
Well, when it was time to go to the theatre for the so-called “symposium” I tripped over a garden hose on the terrace and fell flat on the pavement, suffering quite a few bloody abrasions. My young friend was truly solicitous and Billy was a bit hysterical-looking as antiseptics were applied by my friend to the cuts I’d suffered.
Actually we arrived at the theatre no more than two or three minutes late, but the audience was leaving. They had not been informed of my appearance. I supposed they thought that it would be one appearance too many. I don’t know why I was so upset over this, it was a trivial matter. But Candy Darling’s boy-friend had a car, a white convertible, waiting at the door and he offered to drive our party home. I said, “I’ve had it. Please deliver me to my hotel.” On the way, Mr. Fr
yer suggested that I return to the theatre and read my short story to the second evening’s audience, before the play. This struck, correctly or not, as a reflection upon my sanity and I flew into a blind rage at the man. I told him to shove his West Coast theatre and the announced revival of Streetcar, and I told him various other things no more polite, and then I asked to be let out of the car on a corner several blocks from the hotel. They wouldn’t let me out but drove me to the hotel door. Billy and Fryer remained in the car, both speechless, and the three young men went up to my “Victorian Suite” at the Elysée to see that I didn’t jump out the window, I guess. I soon got hold of myself, drinks were ordered up, my friend massaged my back and talked soothingly and affectionately to me until the phone rang and one of the producers said they had failed to announce my appearance inadvertently and they would pick me up at the Elysée for the midnight show.
It appears that I will do just about anything, now, to keep the show running, that is, short of a tango with a kangaroo partner. So I went. The curtain opened. There was a fair-sized house for midnight. I took a drink of wine and informed the audience that on this occasion I intended to amuse myself, primarily, by reading a story to them.
The eccentric aspects of the story—and eccentric is a mild term for it—didn’t strike me until after. The reception of the reading was, I could say, perfunctory. Lately no one seems to laugh at my jokes on paper, perhaps they’re too black, I don’t know …
I then took the three kids to P. J. Clarke’s eatery and we drank and ate and I then began to reflect more and more upon the frightening compulsive note of self-destruction in which I had been indulging myself lately.
My friend took one kid: another left alone in my hat, a Dobbs Western. I’d presented it to him—and another friend took me home. He’s a nice kid and he is now asleep in the twin bed while I knock out this preposterous account of the night before …
Make of it what you will. I can make of it nothing but a sense of doom.
To return again to 1948, I have a bit more to report on that season.
Frankie and I had been out late one evening and when we returned to the apartment the transom on the front door was open and from within came the voice of Truman Capote, shrill with agitation. We let ourselves in.
In the apartment were Truman, Gore Vidal, and a female policeman: they were called “the Bo-peep squad” in those days. It seemed that Truman and Gore, still on friendly terms at this point, had got a bit drunk together and had climbed in through the transom of the apartment to wait for me and Frankie.
The lady on the Bo-peep squad had been passing along by patrol-car as they were climbing through the transom. She pursued them into the pad and she was now in the process of searching the premises for suspected narcotics and she was holding Gore and Truman for breaking and entering.
She had located some Seconals in the bedroom and she was making a big deal of it. (In those days my use of sleeping pills was very occasional and only at bedtime.)
Frankie and I managed to calm her down enough to prevent the arrest of Truman and Gore. Having only turned up the few Seconals in the way of dope, she stepped angrily out.
Summer and Smoke was still surviving at the Music Box in early December when Frankie, Paul Bowles and I took passage on the Italian liner Vulcania, which is the most charming ship I’ve ever voyaged upon. Outside each first class stateroom was a verandah. I breakfasted and worked out there in the mornings, while Frankie slept inside—he was always a late and sound sleeper in his years of health.
My sexual feeling for the boy was inordinate. Every evening I would cross to his bunk in the stateroom. Aware of my sexual intemperance and what its consequences could be, I began to entertain a suspicion that something was going on between Frankie and Paul Bowles. Nothing was, of course, except friendship—and perhaps they also may have shared an interest in some derivative of Cannabis, as many of the “in” people did in those days. Bowles asked me to read a short story of his which became the title story for a collection published a year or two later. This story was “The Delicate Prey” and it shocked me. This seems odd, I know. And I think it was quite incomprehensible to Paul that I, who had published such stories as “Desire and the Black Masseur” should be shocked by “The Delicate Prey.” I recognized it as a beautiful piece of prose but I advised him against its publication in the States. You see, my shocking stories had been published in expensive private editions by New Directions and never exhibited on a bookstore counter.
Except for all that, the voyage was extremely pleasant. The Vulcania served excellent food. It had a charming little bar with Chinese décor. There was a big storm at sea which made Frankie seasick but which I found exhilarating.
We arrived off the shore of Gibraltar and there for the first time met Paul’s wife, Jane Bowles, whom I regard as the finest writer of fiction we have had in the States. You will probably think this a wild opinion but I must stick to it. She had a unique sensibility in all her work that I found even more appealing than that of Carson McCullers. And she was a charming girl, so full of humor and affection and curious, touching little attacks of panic—which I thought at first were merely bits of theatre but which I soon found were quite genuine. And I don’t mean to say—God forbid—that theatre is not sometimes authentic.
When Jane Bowles succumbed to a long illness in a convent-hospital in Malaga, Spain, in 1973, she left an irreplaceable vacancy in the lives of all who were so fortunate as to have known her. When her collected works were published in a single volume about seven years ago, these works consisted of a novel of unique quality, Two Serious Ladies, a group of short stories truly equaled in sensibility by the work of no other writer of her time, and a curiously underestimated play, In the Summer House. I had the great good fortune to see this play’s first American production at the University Theatre in Ann Arbor, Michigan, starring the late Miriam Hopkins, who gave a stunning performance.
Later produced on Broadway, this time starring Dame Judith Anderson and Miss Mildred Dunnock, it met with a reception that I would describe as bewildered, although Miss Dunnock’s performance was one of her most poignant.
For what it may be worth, I feel impelled to offer the opinion that it is a dramatic work of such profound sensibility, mixed with Jane’s unfailingly acute admixture of humor and pathos, that it stands quite superbly alone among works for the American theatre.
We spent a night at the Rock Hotel in Gibraltar and the following day we crossed on a big ferry to Tangier with our beautiful maroon Buick Roadmaster; I had stubbornly refused to drive into the mountains of Southern Spain, an excursion which Paul was anxious to make; in those days I didn’t think that my heart could take even a moderate altitude. And I was eager to get settled.
We stayed a few days in Tangier and then we set off in the Roadmaster for Fez, where Paul’s very young friend Ahmed was waiting for him. We had fantastic difficulty crossing the frontier of Spanish Morocco. Bowles always traveled with at least a dozen pieces of luggage. These provoked the suspicion of the Spanish authorities at the frontier. Every piece of our luggage had to be removed to the customhouse for a maniacally thorough inspection. We had passed through a terrific thunderstorm and it was still storming. While we were in the customs’ shed, one of us suddenly noticed that the brakes on the Roadmaster weren’t holding and that it was rolling rather rapidly backward straight toward a deep ravine.
Little Frankie dashed out and stopped the car just before it reached the drop-off. It was quite a display of courage, which he never lacked. Well, they wouldn’t let us continue and they tried to confiscate my typewriter and several pieces of Paul’s luggage. We had to return to Tangier: the Hotel Rembrandt.
Luckily I had some newspaper friends in Tangier, they promptly phoned all frontier stations between Tangier and Fez informing them that a group of important Americans were going to drive through the next day. Off we went again and at each frontier we were waved on without inspection.
We arrived at th
e Hotel Jamais in Fez about nightfall. Among the mail waiting for me there was a cablegram that plunged me into depression. It informed me that Summer and Smoke was about to close, due to the drop in attendance that Broadway plays have always suffered during the weeks before Christmas. I suspect, however, that, Christmas or not, it couldn’t have survived much longer.
The Hotel Jamais was one of the loveliest in the world. It had been the palace of a sultan and its furnishings remained in their original style. Just next to it was the tower of a mosque, on the terrace of which the Koran was chanted softly at hourly intervals through the night.
But I could not shake off my depression over the fate of Summer and Smoke. I liked Fez no more than I had liked Tangier and I insisted that we drive to Casablanca, Frankie and I, and catch a ship to Marseilles, from which we would head for Rome.
Frankie turned very sulky and we came close to a quarrel during that drive to Casablanca. The ship to Marseilles was horrid. The food was bad and the passengers unpleasant and noisy.
I think it took us about three days to reach Marseilles. As soon as we entered Italy, Frankie’s good humor returned as did mine.
And it was now the winter of 1949, month of January, and Frankie and I began our first of many long stays in Rome.
What is my profession but living and putting it all down in stories and plays and now in this book?
After her great success with Streetcar, a success which surely she deserved, Irene M. Selznick had rejected The Rose Tattoo, telling me rather crushingly that it was material for an opera, not for a play. Cheryl Crawford thought otherwise: she embraced it warmly and gave it a fine production, in 1950.
Young Eli Wallach was a wonderful choice to play Mangiacavallo. And that fine young actor Don Murray was perfect to play the sailor-love of Serafina’s daughter. There was great trouble casting Serafina. It was I who found Maureen Stapleton for the part. Her reading convinced us all that, despite her youth, she could do it; she was a very young girl at the time but nevertheless I thought she was so brilliant in characterization that the obstacle of her youth could be overcome. So I kept insisting that she read and read again. Finally I assisted her in “making up” for a reading: I had her dishevel her hair and wear a sloppy robe, and I think even streak her face to look like dirt stains. And that reading she gave made all agree that she was the one.