Memoirs

  I instantly dialed “O” for operator and shouted into the phone, “Get the police at once up to Hermit’s Glen! My house has been invaded and there’s blood on the floor!”

  The psychiatrist fled down the steps and hotfooted it out to his car. And then Pat got down on all fours to swab up the bloodstains on the carpet.

  Having won this bout, I then called Audrey Wood—who hated Pat and was fond of Ryan—and gave her a breathless account of what had taken place.

  “Right now,” she informed me, “Ryan is being bailed out of jail to which Pat sent him as a housebreaker. I told him to go straight to the Hollywood-Roosevelt Hotel and wait for you there.”

  I left the house up in Hermit’s Glen under police escort—to the Hollywood-Roosevelt, where I was shortly joined by Ryan. The next day we flew back together to Manhattan …

  But I was headed for the bin, and in ’69, following the vicious put-down of In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel—and my flight with Anne Meacham to Tokyo when she’d told me that Life was coming out with a statement of my professional demise—I really began to crack.

  Oh, I’d been cracking for years but then the cracking was like that subterranean fault, under the West Coast.

  I like the crowd I’m with, here in Venice, all of them: Sylvia Miles, Joe Dallesandro, Paul Morrissey, little Andy Warhol so much like a lost little boy, lost in time.

  Morrissey strikes me as someone very special. I would like him to make a film of one of my short stories: why not “Two on a Party,” which may be the best of the lot? I will ask him to read it. But I respect him too much to hustle him about it.

  I am hoping that some moral change for the better may occur soon, as well as relief from loneliness, and I hope that the two wishes are not in complete contradiction or counterpoise to each other …

  I think I like Rex Reed. From the moment we met, we could talk to each other but I suppose I talked too much when he interviewed me for Esquire. No, I take that back. It’s true that I didn’t pinch the ass of a black waiter in Brennan’s, but still he caught my nature.

  Last night was a lovely evening. After sleeping all afternoon in my suite here at the familiar old Excelsior, the Adriatic washing gently and constantly below my balconied windows, I had a little swim. You have to wade out too far at the Lido and the water cannot be described as translucent as the Mediterranean is, or was, at Taormina—it was time to have drinks with Pat and Michael York. Billy Barnes had arranged it while I slept, and, oh, a call from London—Maria arrives tomorrow and she sounded warm and elated on the phone.

  Of course I met with some of the familiar irritants of traveling alone. I feel that I am traveling alone, even when I am with a party of people, when there is no one sharing my rooms. I can’t get things together. It took me forty minutes to assemble my tuxedo and accessories. The pants had fallen into the bottom of the Val-pack and, of course, I started cursing, being convinced that only the jacket had been packed. But when I got all assembled and was dressed in my finery—the shirt with the lace cuffs flaring discreetly and the ruffled shirt front and the black tie eventually secured precariously—can a thing be precariously secured?—I was still early for the six-o’clock cocktail date.

  Impatient, I called Billy and said I thought it would be more fun if we met in the hotel cocktail lounge, instead of the salon of my suite and of course I was quite wrong, as usual, it was not better at all but distinctly worse. I sat with Billy at a table for four and a wretched queen started playing the grand piano directly behind us.

  “Some damn child is banging on that piano,” I said loudly to Billy.

  “I’m afraid it’s their professional pianist,” said Billy, “and we’d better move someplace where we can talk.”

  From the point that the Yorks met us it was a lovely evening. Pat had just had her hair dressed, so she remained in the cabin of the launch with Billy—I sat on the open-back bench with Michael and the lagoon was as lovely as I remembered it.

  “Ah, Venice, city of pearls,” I said, quoting from Camino.

  We dined simply and quickly on the Gritti terrace (spaghetti alla vongole) while a three-quarter moon floated gradually from behind the white dome of a church across the canal and I got nicely high on Frascati, first, and then on a better wine indigenous to Venice.

  You see, we had to hurry back to the Lido as Michael’s film, Cabaret, was to be the inaugural spettacolo of the festival.

  Now back in the Excelsior bar, I sat on the arm of Pat’s chair with beautiful ladies such as Marisa Berenson across the table while Michael was being interviewed just behind us. Cameras were flashing continually.

  I asked a producer at the table if he had any money. He said no. And I said, “Then I’m not talking to you.”

  In the late summer of 1969, Anne Meacham and Gigi and I returned from our dismal flight to Tokyo and I returned to the little compound in Key West. I was not with it there, I was not at all with it, the collapse had started.

  The construction of the big new kitchen had also started, the kitchen which was to cost twice the 1949 purchase price of the entire property. And the erection was to last for nearly four months, which is a much longer-lasting erection than even Casanova might have desired.

  The stove had been removed to the patio so I could prepare my morning Silex of coffee. And one nocturnal morning, a few days after the return to Key West, I prepared one Silex of coffee too many. I was, at this time, always falling down, you may recall, and as I removed the boiling coffee from the stove in the patio, I came a cropper on the patio tiles, spilling the boiling coffee over my bare shoulder.

  I was so spaced out that I felt no pain and went about my morning’s work as usual.

  At this point the fog sets in. I remember going to a doctor who bandaged the lobster-red shoulder and then I remember that Dakin was in Key West. Then I remember we were in Key West airport and poor Edie Kidd came by my table and I said to her, “I like your painting, Edie, but have no other interest in you at all.”

  And then I was in the house on Wydown Boulevard in Clayton, Mom’s old Spanish stucco dwelling, and it was morning and I had firmly decided not to enter a hospital.

  “Mother, have you ever heard of sibling envy?”

  “Oh yes, I think so,” said Miss Edwina coldly.

  130. The superb Anne Meacham and Jon Lee, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel.

  131. Kate Hepburn stole the acting honors in the film of Suddenly, Last Summer.

  132. Liz Taylor luring the beach boys of Barcelona, in the film of Suddenly, Last Summer.

  133. Monty Clift and Liz Taylor in Suddenly, a bad film that was very profitable.

  134. Sweet Bird of Youth on Broadway, with Paul Newman as Chance Wayne and Geraldine Page as the Princess Kosmonopolis.

  135. Newman and Page brilliantly co-star again, in the movie of Sweet Bird.

  136. This Property Is Condemned, a vastly expanded and hardly related film with the title taken from a very delicate one-act play. The film was hardly deserving of the talents of Robert Redford and Natalie Wood.

  137. Night of the Iguana with Alan Webb, Margaret Leighton, Patrick O’Neal and Bette Davis.

  138. Bette Davis as Maxine Falk in Iguana.

  139. Richard Burton and Ava Gardner in the film version of The Night of the Iguana.

  140. From Milk Train. How could Paul Roebling remain asleep between Hermione Baddelev and Mildred Dunnock?

  141. Margaret Leighton, Zoe Caldwell and Kate Reid in The Gnadiges Fraulein (part of Slapstick Tragedy)—my best work of the sixties.

  142. Claire Bloom, exhausted in her dressing room after the opening of Streetcar in London, 1974.

  143. Small Craft Warnings, in which I made my first and last appearance as an actor—achieving stardom without talent.

  144. Cara Duff-MacCormick and Michael York in Out Cry, a financially successful play that closed precipitately after demolition by critics in New York.

  A bit later I said I would go to the hospital provided an ambula
nce was summoned to take me. Dakin talked me out of that. He got me into his car and drove me to Barnacle Hospital. At first, that first day, I was put in the Queen’s Division—and I didn’t make up that name, that’s just what it’s called. It is the rather posh division for the “mildly disturbed.” I was placed under the “care” of three neurologists and an internist.

  All that I remember of my first day in Queen’s Division was lying in bed watching TV. Every program seemed to be directed at me with some thickly disguised hostility, even Shirley Booth’s soap opera struck me as a personally menacing thing.

  About 6 P.M., in comes Dakin, grinning, with a bunch of yellow flowers and some remarkably talentless crayon drawings that were drawn for my delectation by his two adopted daughters.

  Mother marched in, a little Prussian officer in drag.

  There was now, quite clearly, something impending of a fearful nature. I sensed this and I scrambled with remarkable agility out of bed and said, “I’m going home right now,” and I ran into the closet to get into my clothes.

  “Oh no, Son.”

  “You all will drive me right home or I’ll walk.”

  I got myself dressed with amazing alacrity, all the while shouting abuse at Dakin.

  “God damn you and your two adopted children. How dare you give them our family name.”

  Dakin: “I don’t have to sit here and listen to this abuse.”

  Now fully dressed and totally out of my mind, I charged into the corridor and down to the elevators. I started to enter one, was blocked in this escape effort by a huge young man in hospital uniform. He was blond, I remember, with a beefy, sneering face. I somehow slipped past him into the elevator but he wouldn’t let the doors close.

  Raging and storming invectives, I rushed back past him to the room where Mother was asking a nurse for smelling salts. Jesus!

  Then I lit into her with a vengeance.

  “Why do women bring children into the world and then destroy them?”

  (I still consider this a rather good question.)

  Said Miss Edwina—sincerely?—“I just don’t know if we’re doing the right thing.”

  I turned again to the corridor but now the door was obstructed by a wheel-chair with straps and by a goon squad of interns.

  Now suddenly I recognized defeat and gave up.

  Clutching the flight bag that contained my booze, my pills, my vial of speed, clutching it despairingly and tightly, I was strapped into the chair and rocketed out of Queen’s Division to Friggins’ Violent Ward—there the flight bag was snatched from me, and at this point I blacked out …

  I am in the violent ward of Friggins Division of Barnacle Hospital. I said I had blacked out and so I did—when they snatched my flight bag from me.

  Now I am going to tell you as much as I can about my closest brush with death.

  After I blacked out, I don’t know whether I came to or not.

  And I don’t know how long the convulsions lasted. I know that there were three of them in one morning and there was the “silent coronary,” which is the only thing during the apocalypse that’s clear to me, as I felt, through my convulsions, the stabbing pains of it.

  I went through a time of total fantasy.

  I recall being strapped to a table and wheeled about. But never medicated.

  I refuse to ascribe to paranoia my conviction that the resident physician intended to commit legalized murder upon my person and very nearly succeeded.

  I had a most extraordinary experience which may or may not have occurred the evening after the convulsions.

  I am walking very, very slowly down a corridor toward a lighted room and I am chanting a poem.

  The recurrent line of each verse is “Redemption, redemption.” And I am performing, as I move slowly down the corridor, a mincing exaggeration of the walk of a drag-queen. What was I chanting about? About the birth of my brother Dakin when I was eight and my first sight of him, suckling the bare breast of my mother in the St. Louis hospital.

  Redemption from what? A never-before-spoken sibling rivalry with him, I would suppose. And also a redemption from the “crime” of my love-life with boys and young men …

  The truth is that I don’t really want to go back over the time in Friggins Division of Barnacle Hospital in the city of St. Pollution. It’s all been fairly well taken care of, in a documentary way, in “What’s Next on the Agenda, Mr. Williams?”

  I shall only recount a few bits omitted from the “poem.”

  After my convulsions and my indeterminate period of delirium, I woke up in a narrow cubicle in a bed with barred sides like a big baby’s crib. And when I say I woke up, I mean my eyes were open and I was experiencing some degree of cogitation but I wasn’t really awake for an hour or two, I couldn’t have been since I remembered nothing and didn’t know where I was.

  The realization came upon me like death.

  Strange figures passed my open door on a narrow corridor, I couldn’t believe they were real. I literally thought I was dreaming.

  I don’t believe I was visited, perhaps not even brought food, before evening, at least I have no recollection of it.

  But in the evening I was outside my cubicle and Dakin was in the “dayroom.” He had a sort of triumphant smirk on his face and he bore a copy of Esquire, the issue which contained that horror piece of fiction, an article called “A Dream of Tennessee Williams” and his first words to me, beside his grin of greeting and hearty handshake, was the devastating question: “Do you know that you have had a silent coronary? And several convulsions?”

  Then he presented me with that issue of Esquire and made a grinning departure and I began my desperate effort to hang onto myself in the Violent Ward at Friggins.

  In what way was I violent there?

  I dutifully came to their atrocious meals and the rest of the time I crouched like a defenseless animal in a corner while the awful pageantry of the days and the nights went on, a continual performance of horror shows, inside and outside my skull.

  I intended to survive.

  Little mementos of it.

  A huge nurse with a great Germanic blond head and a fixed grimace of jubilant authority kept stalking about, arms swinging like a wrestler’s before he catches hold of an opponent, oh yes, lovely Miss Rothschild she was, and let me tell you this: I gave that lady no mouth!

  Speaking of mouths, there was this fantastically exhibitionist middle-aged queen who paraded about, Miss Rothschild’s opposite number, and he was continually arranging his gray hair with his fluttering fingers as he sashayed about and then one day this glowering Irish truck-driver type sprang up and fetched him the most terrible clout in the mouth I’ve ever witnessed. All of the faggot’s front teeth were knocked out as if he’d been struck in the mouth by a sledge hammer. For days, his face was a baboon’s ass to look at, the mouth swollen out as far as his nose and its interior a crimson cavern. But this did not diminish his concern with his gray hair, the fingers went on fluttering over the carefully arranged waves.

  Then—God help me!—his assailant began to draw a chair up beside mine, in the corner where I crouched, and to stare at me, from time to time, with the same look he had given the Narcissan old queen.

  There was the day a young girl with a great head of brilliant red hair was dragged screaming into the ward and thrown into a padded cell and left there screaming all night and when I next saw her, in place of the brilliant and thick head of hair was a mound of bloodstained bandages.

  I had begun to ask questions of a young intern who was friendlier than the others and he informed me that the girl had torn all of her hair out while screaming in the padded cell that night, torn it all out by the roots.

  I had a few suits in my locker. Dakin had brought them over.

  Surreptitiously I searched the pockets and discovered a little cache of “pinkies,” about five capsules: I would take one at bedtime to supplement the totally ineffective sleeping medication prescribed by my doctors, who had not yet foun
d time to call on me in the ward.

  When these capsules were exhausted I began to spend three and four sleepless nights and days in a row.

  Finally there would be a night of such exhaustion that I would sleep an hour.

  One night as I was falling asleep—yes, really drifting away—the door flew open upon a young intern who was scarcely describable as friendly.

  “My God, what do you want?”

  “You didn’t turn in your electric shaver at the desk!”

  “What of it?”

  He snatched the Norelco off the tiny bureau and said, “Patients in this ward are not allowed to keep anything in their rooms that they can hurt themselves with.”

  I went out into the hall after him and I went up to the night nurse’s glassed-in box from which she monitored the inmates.

  I pounded on the door. Several nurses and interns gathered and I went into hysteria over the incident just related.

  “I was falling asleep, I was really falling asleep after not sleeping four nights and he burst into my room for my electric shaver.”

  I kept repeating it and I began to sob and the night nurse turned to a woman and she spoke to me gently.

  “Go back to your cubicle, your medication may start working again.”

  It didn’t though.

  My cubicle was right next to the garbage disposal plant, a huge one, and an hour before first light it would start its grinding thunder and that was the only way I knew when day was approaching, for my watch had also been confiscated since it contained glass and nothing containing glass was permitted to remain in the possession of a patient in that ward.