The more consequential occurrence in the mid-sixties was my becoming a patient of a physician sometimes called Dr. Feel Good. I had reached such a state of depression that somebody who cared about me had to do something to help me, and it turned out to be a gentleman with whom I was associated professionally—I think he would rather I didn’t mention his name. He had been a patient of Dr. Feel Good’s for a long time, taking the Feel Good therapies as a substitute for a period of alcoholism in his past and he sincerely believed that this doctor could rescue me from my condition. And so one evening when I had just returned, in a state of near-collapse, to New York, this gentleman, deeply concerned, took me over to the office of Dr. Feel Good and there I received the first of my “feel good” injections. I must admit that I was terrified of taking it, but the doctor had about him a magical atmosphere of understanding and compassion. He did not submit me to the usual physical examinations: I don’t think he even took my pulse or blood pressure or had me fill out a questionnaire about my medical history. He just looked at me. His inspection was deceptively casual. He was not only looking at me but probably right through me. Then he started concocting the shot, drawing a bit of fluid from one bottle and another and another as my suspense and my alarm increased. He chatted away while this was going on in the most reassuringly jocular manner. At last he told me to let my trousers down: he jabbed a hypodermic full of mysterious fluids into my hips and within about a minute a miracle took place. I felt as if a concrete sarcophagus about me had sprung open and I was released as a bird on the wing.
The gentleman who had taken me there had gone home, but a young actor of my acquaintance was present: in fact, he was a part-time assistant as well as patient of the doctor. He drove me home to the empty apartment on East Sixty-fifth, but by a long detour, as I had left my luggage at Kennedy Airport. I kept saying, “My God, I feel so wonderful.” Then I asked him, “How long will it last?” He smiled rather sadly and said, “Tennessee, don’t think about that.”
At first I only went to Dr. Feel Good’s for injections, but soon he was also providing me with vials, each one a little different from the ones preceding, and I was injecting myself intramuscularly when I got up in the mornings.
Perhaps if I had given up liquor, and my nightly sedation of two Doriden tablets and a five-hundred-milligram Mellaril tablet, not to mention the morning barbiturate which I took immediately after the intramuscular injection, I would have had no adverse consequences from my involvement with the doctor.
When I traveled, which I continued to do a great deal, Dr. Feel Good would mail me vials of the stuff wherever I might go. If they arrived a day or two later than expected, I would be panicky about it: but they would, eventually, reach me. They kept me working. They kept me going. Until—but that comes later.
Now I’ll revert to the tall young man whom I have named Ryan.
For nearly five years in the sixties I lived with him. I met him in that penthouse apartment, two stories, which I occupied briefly with cousin Jim Adams. Ryan and Mike Steen appeared one day and took me out somewhere in Ryan’s English sports-car, a Triumph.
Ryan asked me if I didn’t recall our first meeting: I did not. He said he had come over to my place with a group of friends one night in the fifties and I had immediately commented upon the beauty of his ass.—Well, that sounds like me, for sure …
A short while later Ryan began to drop in more and more regularly at night. I recall how delicious were his old-fashioneds, made with orange juice. I recall our listening to Billie Holiday’s last album, “Lady in Satin,” and my enchantment with it
Many people would say that Ryan was the handsomest of my companions, but I assure you that my long stay with him had more to do with his managerial expertise—that he did have—than to my emotional attachment. True, he had a rollicking nature and we laughed a lot together. But it was somewhat ruthless the way that he got young cousin Jim out of the apartment and took his place.
I am still fond of Ryan. He had much to do with my gradual (?) breakdown, perhaps. But he must have endured a good deal himself. It’s not easy to live with a writer who has elected to be a zombie except for his mornings at work. I was only interested in working. I didn’t know if I wanted to live or not and Ryan had to cope with that and naturally it was a burden.
Ryan did devote much of his time to me, escorting me to my last analyst and to the “Y” for swims. Yet I’m afraid he considered me mostly as a convenience, and I tell you truly as ever that during our nearly five years together he offered himself to me only three or four times, and, as best I can remember, I had no carnal knowledge of anyone but him during his time with me.
All close relationships are turned later to poems. This thing could include portraits of Ryan and me in such places as Rome and Key West and New York: of Ryan embracing Elizabeth Taylor during the shooting of the film BOOM on the island of Sardinia. He was bisexual and very attractive to ladies with the exception of the Lady Maria St. Just and Miss Ellen McCool, both of whom objected to his very beautiful and very blue eyes.
(“God bless your eyes,” his mother had said to him when he left for legitimate work in the mornings.)
I remember a night in the sixties when Ryan and I were living (separate bedrooms) at that ghastly high-rise next to the Dakota, on Central Park West. We were living on the thirty-third floor, and one night, very, very late, I received a frantic call from a lady friend who had been a vanished lady—deep into pills—for several years. She said she didn’t have money to get back to her parents’ home. I told her to come over and I’d give her cab fare.
She had been there only a few minutes when she begged me to give her some Seconals. “I know you’ve got some.”
I did, but I feared that she’d never get to her parents if she took any more of my precious “pinkies.” I gave her a couple of Miltowns instead.
Then Ryan returned from his habitual night prowlings. She silently observed him for a moment or two and then said, “I want to talk to you privately, Tennessee.” We went off on that ghastly little concrete balcony which had scarcely room enough for two chairs. There she said to me, “Tennessee, how do you dare to live on the thirty-third floor of a building with a man with eyes like that and with a balcony he could throw you off of?”
Well, being a madman, then, I called Morgan-Manhattan Storage the next morning and had the apartment emptied of all furniture, just like that.
I moved alone to a hotel—the Alrae?—but in a day or two Ryan discovered my whereabouts and moved in with me. I accepted his return. We took a suite of two bedrooms. The advance rent on the high-rise apartment was sacrificed. Ryan probably started, then, to hate me. But he disguised it, if he did. We resumed our daily roamings about Manhattan, shopping and having lunches at a charming little French restaurant called L’Escargot and swimming at the “Y.”
One little story of an occurrence in Positano, Italy. We were summering there and Nan Lanier, then separated from her husband, had met us in Naples at the Excelsior and we were a trio at Positano. I was having difficulty walking, due to my speed-shots and pills. We were going somewhere in a cab. Ryan and Nan and I were in the rear seat, Ryan’s arm seductively about the shoulders of Nan, a very sexy lady. He turned to me and with that superb arrogance of his said, “Tennessee, why don’t you get in the front seat with the driver?”
He had somehow miscalculated my reaction to such an insult.
“Ryan, get the hell out of the cab!”
And out he got …
I was never deep enough into the oblivion of the sixties that I could be put down. I would fall down often, yes, but was put down only by reviewers …
In 1967, with a $400,000 bit of “front money” from a Hollywood studio, with David Merrick producing for Broadway, and with José Quintero directing—I put on Kingdom of Earth, a play I’d written for Maureen Stapleton but which was played by Estelle Parsons.
Things went not well at all.
Merrick wanted to fire Quintero, but
I insisted that he remain and Merrick acquiesced to my insistence.
We opened disastrously in New York despite the superb performances of Parsons and Brian Bedford.
Certain biased reviewers were particularly nasty about the play. They said that they couldn’t wait for the threatening flood to occur, the house to be demolished and everyone in it drowned.
Strangely, it was Walter Kerr, in his Sunday piece, who observed that it was a play that contained excellent and funny characterization and that he hoped I’d rewrite it someday.
What it actually needed was cutting, and dear José was not the one for that. Humor he has, but it’s a delicate humor that exists in a heart full of sorrow.
I may have mentioned seeing a perfect revival of Kingdom of Earth in a small, remote house on the Coast. It was cut to its proper length, beautifully cast, and the lady who directed it brought out its bawdy and yet touching style and its strong thematic content.
More about plays in the sixties, “The Stoned Age.”
Slapstick Tragedy, a double bill of two short plays, was produced in 1966 and once again the press hit me with all the ammo in their considerable and rather ruthless possession.
Margaret Leighton was superb as The Gnadiges Fraulein and Zoe Caldwell was also superb. But this one-act play was dismissed by Walter Kerr with this devastating one-liner at the end of his notice. “Black Comedy is not for Mr. Williams.”
It was I who invented American black comedy and he was surely smart enough to know it.
He also spoke with patronizing compassion about the other of the two plays, The Mutilated, a work that had potential but never got off the ground. It was an overextended piece, inflated, and in my opinion badly directed by Alan Schneider, the little grinning director in the red baseball cap. It ran for four performances under the aegis of Charles Bowden and Lester Persky.
The evening after it opened I took Maggie Leighton and Michael Wilding to Sardi’s. An act of sheer defiance. Ryan was with us, and we entered ahead and I heard Maggie remark to Wilding, “Poor thing, it’s pitiful, he doesn’t know what hit him.”
I knew what had hit me, but I held my tongue …
I will never forget the superb performance of Leighton in Fraulein, and neither would anyone who saw it.
My next play in the sixties was In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel. I was still always falling down during this time and I would always say, before falling, “I’m about to fall down,” and almost nobody, nobody ever caught me.
One morning during this “Stoned Age” was that awful morning when I stumbled out into the living room to find it filled with Mike Wallace and a TV crew, that time when Mike finally said, “Okay, let’s pack up, we’re not going to get anything from him today.”
The husband and wife who produced Tokyo Bar came down to Key West and although I saw them daily for about a week I had afterward no recollection of their visit, nor of their plan to produce this work given them by Audrey.
Donald Madden and Anne Meacham starred in it and they were superb.
Mother and Dakin came to the opening. Mother said to me, “Tom, it’s time for you to find another occupation now.”
Oh, Christ, I’m lonely this morning. Do you know what I mean, I mean how much I mean it?
No one, really, since Frankie—except old friends.
That sounds like self-pity, which is a human emotion which is sometimes unavoidable, regardless of its abnegation of pride.
But I’ve had a wonderful and terrible life and I wouldn’t cry for myself: would you?
It seems that I am about to lose my mother. When I called her two days ago in response to her strange letter begging me to come home and take her wherever I am, I told her that I was about to leave for New Orleans and would be happy to receive her there, that Dakin could put her on a plane and I would meet it.
“Oh, Tom, I’ve just returned from New Orleans. I was in Deaconess Hospital there and I caught a dreadful sore throat from sleeping on unwashed sheets. Hurry home to St. Louis.”
“Mother, I’ll call Dakin. Where would he be now?”
“At his law office, I think.”
“What’s his number there, Mother?”
“Oh, Son, I’d have to go upstairs to find it and I can’t go up.”
Of course I was awfully disturbed. I got Dakin’s office number through directory assistance in Collinsville. His secretary answered, quite coolly, and said that Dakin could not be reached at the moment, but I could call him that evening at Mother’s, at about six.
He called at six and was at Mother’s. I told him that she’d informed me she’d just returned from Deaconess Hospital, in New Orleans, and I asked him if her hardly coherent story was true.
He told me that she had not been to New Orleans but had just been released from Deaconess Hospital in St. Louis.
“How is she?”
“Very weak. It’s hard for her to walk.”
Then she came on the phone and said again, “Tom, hurry home.”
Today I am going to call her doctors to get a report on her actual condition.
I was so disturbed last night it was scarcely possible to give a performance at the New Theatre.
If the Deaconess doctors’ report is bad, as I expect, I will have to go to St. Louis, a place I dread, when I am, myself, just hanging on by my teeth.
I have given what I expect will be my final performance in Small Craft Warnings; it was also our farewell to Helena Carroll and so I bought a couple of bottles of Piper-Heidseck champagne and at the curtain I announced to the audience, after we’d taken our group bow, that tonight “was Miss Carroll’s hundred and fifty-second and final performance in the play and we wish to express our appreciation of her brave and brilliant work.” Then, as arranged—we all turned to her and applauded her with the audience. When the curtain fell we toasted her and her sister, who was attending the performance that night, with the champagne and so her engagement ended upon a gracious note—which I feel was fitting since she has, indeed, worked very hard under difficult circumstances.
The scuttlebutt is that the producers wanted her out of the play and told her it was going to close in order to get her resignation: in other words, her departure was engineered by the management, and I feel the little woman is bright enough to suspect this fact and to be hurt, now, that she is being replaced by Peg Murray.
I know that these are the cruel exigencies of life in the theatre: there is little or no sentiment to be encountered in its machinations. It is a mirror of nature. The individual is ruthlessly discarded for the old, old consideration of profit.
After the performance I rushed home. Jane and Tony Smith were waiting in the lobby and we went up to the Victorian Suite, along with Billy Barnes, to make our planned phone call to the indignant Lady St. Just. Domestics who answered the phone both at her London town-house and at the country estate in Salisbury told us icily that “Her Ladyship” could not be reached. I remarked to Tony that I am beginning to fear, now, that “the lady is afflicted with folie de grandeur”—and he smiled.
Billy and I were luckless in getting Genevieve Bujold on the phone in Montreal. I am increasingly fearful that she is scared of the play Out Cry and of moving to New York for its run—which leaves us where with Merrick and the planned production in late September?
We dined at Casey’s in the Village and I got quite high on Margaux. I stumbled over a curbstone, on our way home, tearing the pants of my best suit and skinning my knee. Of course I’m alarmed by this resumed tendency to fall over things. Now both knees are scabbed.
Rest is indicated and less dependence on liquor, in the evening, to disguise my growing exhaustion—especially since the disguise turns out to be a further exposure …
Having arrived home, I called Mother. She was very slow to answer the phone: when she did, she said she was having to “wait up until midnight” to admit Dakin and “some young black woman” living with him upstairs. This struck me as most improbable even for my improbable little brother
. I asked her to have Dakin call me soon as he came in last night—since she could not recall the name of her physician.
Dakin called about midnight, New York time. He laughed at Mother’s charge of his cohabitation with “some young black woman upstairs,” provided me with the name of Mother’s doctor, whom I shall try to contact today for a diagnosis of her condition. Dakin says she can only walk a few steps at a time without catching hold of something—he also admitted, most astonishingly, that he himself had not talked to the doctor.
One fantastic night in the summer of ’67, Bill Inge attempted to have me put away. I was living in a house up in Hermit’s Glen, near Los Angeles. On that strange night, Ryan and a guy I’ll call Pat had a fight while I lay drugged in my back bedroom. I woke up and staggered into the kitchen-living room of the house to find the floor stained with blood and a strange and formidable man in the house who subjected me to a piercing inquisition. My secretary pro tem, “The Virginian,” spoke not a word, just stood in the kitchen area washing dishes.
I rose to the occasion and demanded that the strange man—Inge’s current psychiatrist, as it turned out, dispatched by Inge—leave my house at once or face a charge of illegal entry. Finally the psychiatrist saw that he could not question or stare me down.
“Let him make a phone call to William Inge,” he said, “if he promises not to call the police!”
I phoned Inge about the situation at Hermit’s Glen and asked him to come right over and clear it up. Inge replied loftily, “I’m sorry I can’t come over, I’m entertaining tonight.”