Frankie’s pal entered abruptly and observed the goings-on and he promptly called Frankie in New York, at the hospital where he was having the checkup.
Frankie flew home at once, without warning.
That evening he declined to eat and he hardly spoke. He sat in a corner of the living room, looking drugged, his great eyes fastened balefully upon the painter and me. We made conversation as best we could under Frankie’s fierce scrutiny.
Then the scene exploded.
Like a jungle cat, Frankie sprang across the room and seized the painter by the throat and it appeared to me that the painter was being strangled to death—that is one evening when I am pretty sure that Frankie was deep under drugs.
I snatched up the phone and called the police and said there was a dreadful emergency in the house.
Frankie let go of the painter. The cops arrived in a few minutes.
“Mr. Merlo is not at all well,” I told them. “I think he’d be much better off at a friend’s home for the night.”
The cops took in the situation with understanding that is rare in their profession.
All the cops of Key West were fond of Frankie—as was the island’s whole population, I would say. I often thought that Frankie could have run for Mayor of Key West and have won the election by a landslide.
The officers took Frankie to a friend’s. He returned the next morning.
It was that day that the real disruption between Frankie and me took place. Without a word to him, I packed up all my papers in the studio and piled them in the car. Then the painter and I got in. Frankie was sitting silently on the porch with Leoncia, our faithful housekeeper, who was equally silent. But as the motor started, Frankie ran down from the porch.
“Are you going to leave me without shaking hands? After fourteen years together?”
I shook hands with him. Then the painter and I drove away. I drove so badly, swerving from side to side of the Overseas Highway, that the painter crouched in the car in voiceless panic. But we arrived in Coconut Grove without a crash. We checked into some depressing motel. The next day, having fucked ourselves into an exhausted sleep the night before, we had lunch at Marion Vaccaro’s and I told her I’d quit Frankie.
The painter was too much for me, he simply wouldn’t let up on the sex bit and after a couple of days I told him he’d better continue upon his course to San Francisco and I paid him for the portrait left in Key West, to aid in the cost of his journey. Then I went alone to the New York apartment at 134 East Sixty-fifth Street and occupied it alone for a month or two.
It was about this time that I began a serious flirtation with a gifted and handsome young poet. He was living with a much older poet and it was going to pieces between them, since practically every night the older poet would assuage his time-ravaged vanity with liquor. He would be exhilarated and amiable for his first hour on booze: then turn sullen: then he would lash out at all about him like an old caged lion, totally unreconciled to the cage.
The gifted lad, whose name I must withhold, took to spending several nights a week with me. As you may have gathered at this point, I fall in love rather easily, and the ease is easier when the object is warm, willing and “a joy forever.”
I have trouble with placing events in exact chronological order. I can only tell you that this romance with the poet came after Night of the Iguana and of course after my Key West quarrel with Frankie.
I do know that in the late spring of ’61 or ’62, the young poet and I flew to Tangier, to occupy a lovely little rented house just above the beach.
It was a curiously difficult summer, both for me and my new companion. Despite the turbulence which had attended my break with Frankie and despite the charm of the little white house and of the beautiful poet, I was beset by inner torments, the most explicable of which was an inability to talk to people. There was a good deal of social activity that summer in Tangier. The beauty of my companion made us desirable as guests. But at cocktail parties and suppers I sat in silence that was seldom broken. Even with the young poet I could barely communicate except in bed.
He was very sweet and understanding about it. I remember, in particular, a long night of rain.
He said to me, “Rain is the purest water.”
We opened the bedroom shutters and leaned out the window, catching the rain-water in cups and then profaning it with whiskey.
Moments of holy communion …
One afternoon I was alone with Jane Bowles, and I said to Janie, “Janie, I can’t talk anymore.”
She gave me one of her quick little smiles and said, “Tennessee, you were never much of a conversationalist.”
For some reason, perhaps because it made me laugh, and laughter is always a comfort, as Janie was always a comfort, this answer to my anguished confession was a relief for a while.
(I have described that summer in Tangier in a poem, titled “The Speechless Summer,” in the first issue of the magazine Antaeus.)
During this period I was gloomily at work on The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, and so it would be suitable to insert, at this point, the history of that play, which was more dramatic off-stage than on and which reflected so painfully the deepening shadows of my life as man and artist.
People have said and said and said that my work is too personal: and I have just as persistently countered this charge with my assertion that all true work of an artist must be personal, whether directly or obliquely, it must and it does reflect the emotional climates of its creator.
In the late spring of ’62 Frankie came up to Manhattan; I was as frightened of seeing him as I was of seeing Santo after the violences of 1947. Through intermediaries I heard that Frankie, staying at the Hotel Dover, was insisting that we have a meeting. I sent back word that I would talk to him only in the presence of Audrey Wood.
During all this period of separation Frankie was kept on salary and he was not at all in financial straits, having owned 10 per cent of Cat and of Rose Tattoo and Camino Real. It’s strange that I don’t remember what his weekly salary was: I would guess about $150. And not until now did he have any “living expenses.”
The meeting occurred with Miss Wood present in the apartment on Sixty-fifth. Frankie was on his best behavior: dignified, calm, and expressing hurt and bewilderment over our estrangement. Miss Wood was her coolly diplomatic self.
When she left, I insisted that Frankie leave with her. All that had been “arranged” was that Frankie was to be kept under salary—but that our separation was to be “final.”
About ten minutes after Audrey and Frankie left together, Frankie called me on the phone and said it had been quite impossible for him to talk things over with Audrey’s presence and that he was coming back to talk with me privately in the apartment.
“Oh no,” I told him. “If you feel there has to be further talk between us, I’ll meet you in a bar around the corner.”
At the meeting in the bar I remained curiously resolute in my attitude. I remember saying to him, “Frank, I want to get my goodness back.”
He looked at me silently and with understanding.
What did I mean, exactly? He seemed to know but I am not sure now.
He went away, then; I returned alone to the apartment. And not long after that the young poet, whom I’ll call Angel, and I flew to Tangier …
When we returned to Manhattan early that fall, I received a phone call from Marion in Coconut Grove. She told me she had some very bad news for me: she had just received a phone call from Frankie, who was on his way to Manhattan to undergo an operation for suspected lung-cancer.
He had already taken a plane and would be checking into Memorial Hospital, surgery was scheduled to be performed in a few days.
I learned later that Frankie had been sitting with his close friend Dan Stirrup and others at an outdoor café in Key West when all at once he leaned over at the table and a stream of blood poured from his mouth. He’d gone to his Key West doctor, X-rays had been taken and the dark lung a
rea discovered.
I was stricken with remorse.
What I didn’t know was that I was as much in love with Frankie all that difficult time of the early sixties as I had ever been before. The love had gone sick, yes, but it was as deep as ever. I visited him at Memorial the day before his operation; he was quite matter-of-fact about this thing of which I would have been crazed with apprehension.
Memorial is the cancer hospital of New York and to be there is in itself a certificate of the disease, I would guess.
Have I mentioned that Frankie was a chain-smoker? At least four packs a day.
The operation was performed and I next saw The Little Horse in the recovery room, barely conscious and only able to whisper a few words.
I sat by his bed in “recovery” pressing his hand, until an orderly advised me that my visiting time was up. After that I visited him each day until he was released from the hospital.
Then one day—just before his release or possibly just after the surgery—I called his doctors and was told that Frankie’s lung-cancer could not be operated upon. It was situated right alongside his heart and its condition was too advanced for surgery to be effective. So they had sewed him back up, just like that.
“How long?” I asked.
The answer was six months.
I hung up and burst into tears. There was someone with me, the young poet Angel, I suppose, and he tried to comfort me.
As soon as he was released from the hospital, Frankie went straight back to Key West—alone. There he took a small house for himself on the property of one of Frankie’s writer friends whom I had suspected (probably wrongly) of having a secret affair with him.
It was a small but pleasant little frame cottage.
I lost no time in following him down there.
Frankie was quite unaware that effective surgery had not been performed and during the first month or two he gave every evidence of thinking himself quite recovered. I remember him doing one of his wild “Lindy hops” in a local Key West night spot, but also remember that at its conclusion he seemed about to collapse.
I bought a TV for him in his house on Baker’s Lane. Gigi, our dog, was with him; they were inseparable. And then he took a fancy to a little monkey I’d bought in New York, a very bad-tempered and nervous creature whom I had appropriately named “Creature.” I don’t know why this creature appealed so strongly to Frankie. It didn’t to me.
One day I took Creature in its cage over to Frankie and I said, “Keep it with you a while and you’ll be disenchanted with the thing.”
Still I think I liked it, since I’ve never met an animal I didn’t like …
Late that evening Frankie phoned me and his voice was almost hysterical. He’d let Creature out of its cage and it had disappeared.
The evening was spent in frantic search for Creature. After two or three hours I gave up the search but The Horse kept at it. I think it was near midnight, or maybe the next morning, that Frankie phoned.
Again his voice was hysterical.
“It’s back, it’s back!” he cried out.
“What?”
“It just crawled out from under the bed, the one place we didn’t look for him, and he had been there all the while.”
Then he started to cry …
After a few weeks, I asked Frankie to move back into the house on Duncan Street. I was afraid he might refuse, since Angel was still with me, but he did not demur.
He took our old upstairs bedroom and Angel and I occupied the one downstairs.
I could see that he was beginning to fail pretty fast and I could also see that he was desperately denying this fact to himself and all others. He was still pretending, fiercely.
Frankie’s writer friend said to me, “I don’t know if he really thinks they took the cancer out or if he’s giving us the biggest snow-job of all time!”
The six months which the surgeons had allowed Frankie had now expired and he went past that time steadily weakening, but giving not an inch of his fierce pride. He seemed annoyed that I remained so long in Key West that spring, as late as the middle of May. This was not because he resented Angel—the poet was wonderful to him; but he treated Angel almost as if he didn’t exist, which was close to the truth, by this time: I mean in my heart.
Frankie didn’t want a witness to his decline, not such a close one as I. So in the middle of May, Angel and I flew North and we took a house on Nantucket. As soon as we’d settled in it, I called Frankie and begged him to join us for the summer.
Surprisingly, he accepted.
I went over to the mainland to meet him: it was a bitch of a night. An unseasonably cold blast of wind was sweeping across the water: we missed the regular ferry to Nantucket. I hired a small boat to take us over, Frankie and Gigi and I. The cold wind turned icy. Frankie held Gigi tight against him, sitting bolt upright and silent during what seemed an endless crossing.
Almost immediately it was apparent that the Nantucket move wouldn’t do. Frankie disliked the cute little cottage as much as I did: but he wouldn’t go out except for meals at which he barely nibbled. I don’t think we stuck it out for more than a week. Then he returned to Manhattan and from that point on there were continual trips, for Frankie, between the East Sixy-fifth Street apartment and Memorial Hospital. The cancer was spreading relentlessly, quickly, from organ to organ. He ate almost nothing and his weight dropped under a hundred.
One time when I took him back to Memorial for cobalt, that ghastly treatment which burned his chest black, his doctors said, “All we can do is see where it hits him next.”
I sent Angel back to Key West and Frankie and I were alone in the apartment. He had the bedroom and I slept on the long sofa in the narrow study.
And each night—this is what is particularly painful to remember—I would hear him turn the bolt on the bedroom door. Did he, poor child, suppose that I would still be apt to follow him in there and use his skeletal body again for sexual pleasure? That hardly seems conceivable. But why did he bolt the door, then?
I think it was a thing he did automatically: perhaps it was death that he thought he was locking out.
Off and on during the night my sleep, always light, would be broken by the fits of coughing, loud through the wall, and I didn’t dare to call to him.
Today was one of possible great significance in my professional life—Genevieve Bujold had arrived in New York the day before and has now indicated to Bill Barnes and Peter Glenville that she will undertake the female lead in Out Cry—tonight she flew back to Montreal and Bill will call her there for a final confirmation.
When I met her today at Bill’s apartment I saw an incredibly perfect Clare. I exclaimed, as we met, “You’re beautiful! And slightly mad!”
Of course her unspoken reply may well have been: “You are ugly and totally insane.”
Be that as it may …
Afterwards, I picked up my beautiful new suit, gave my best performance so far—not a single fluff—and afterward took Candy Darling to Sardi’s. Her entrance was, of course, sensational. We were given one of the prize tables and in a while were joined by the very touching young writer Nelson Lyon and a beautiful girl who is a publisher. I said to Lyon, “You are at the beginning of a career that I am now finishing.” I meant that I was now finishing my own career, not his—let’s make that clear. We delivered the ladies to their respective homes—Candy next to the Christian Science Church—and the girl publisher to a mansion in the East Sixties or Seventies—then I took Lyon to the Victorian Suite for a nightcap and he stayed with me until I had dropped my Nembutal. He is handsome but my behavior was admirably restrained.
These final recollections of the living Frankie are sad to recall. Yet they contained much to remember with wonder at his strength of spirit and of his pride never broken.
Stirrup came up from Key West and Al Sloane, a close friend of Frankie’s, was also with us almost continually during the day. The disease was ravaging Frank, now, with ferocious intensity. Stirru
p kept suggesting to Frankie that he make out a will—Frankie ignored these somewhat insensitive suggestions and continued stubbornly with his little life. Each morning about noon he and Gigi would come out of the master bedroom and sit side by side on the love seat facing the TV, their faces equally stoical and almost having an identical expression in their eyes.
I think that they would sit there almost all day, Gigi occasionally going onto our little balcony for calls of nature.
Then suddenly he went for a last time to Memorial Hospital. As he dressed to go, I entered the bedroom to assist him but he would accept no assistance. He threw off his robe. His body, that of a little Hercules in the past, had turned to something more like the skeleton of a sparrow.
For the first time when he entered the lobby of Memorial, he was too weak to walk to his ward and accepted a wheel-chair. They put him—and this I think is quite awful—in a ward where all the patients had undergone surgery for brain cancer. It was a nightmare to look at them. I begged him not to stay in that ward but to take a private room. He said sharply, “It doesn’t matter at all to me now, I think I like being with them.”
Since he had been in and out of Memorial so often, I did not recognize this time as the final one.
It happened to coincide with the opening of the second version of Milk Train at the Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Virginia—with Donald Madden, brilliant as Christopher, and Clare Luce, handsome but inadequate as Goforth. Direction was by Adrian Hall, and set by Bobby Soule.
Audrey Wood flew down for opening night. Audience response was enigmatic, and perhaps I should have said apathetic.
The next day I received a phone call from Al Sloane that Frankie was unmistakably taking a turn for the worse. He described his condition to me. I said, “He’ll die this Thursday. I’ll fly back at once.”—And I flew back before the reviews of the Barter Theatre production came out. The morning after my return I visited Frankie at Memorial. He was now receiving oxygen from a bedside tank. I stayed on that day and it was a dreadful vigil for me to keep. He would not stay in his bed for more than a minute or two. He kept staggering out of it and sitting for a couple of minutes in the chair. Then staggering back to the bed.