At first light, a brisk, expressionless nurse with a voice like an automatic drill would charge into the cubicle for an inquisition and the taking of temperature and pulse-rate.
“Bowel-movement yesterday?”
Sometimes I’d give no answers and sometimes I’d groan and cover my face and so my stay in the violent ward was prolonged to a full month—for unco-operative attitudes, I suppose.
In my nature I think that a basic pride of some kind will remain the last thing to go when all else is gone but breath …
The resident physician was very friendly with Dakin and when Dakin came to see me—about once or twice a week—he would chat with him in my presence. He would tell Dakin how I’d had three convulsions in one morning and he told these things with an inflection of pride—as if the convulsions were an accomplishment upon which he congratulated himself.
I had long since read the “Dream of Tennessee Williams” in Esquire when one evening a doctor brought me a copy of the issue and said with his evil grin, “I see you’ve got a very good write-up in here. Want to read it?”
“No, I think not. I’ve read it.”
“Resident physicians are envious of us,” said Dr. Levy, “and so they take it out on our patients …”
Even in the violent ward, the patients had an hour of occupational therapy in the morning and another in the afternoon.
Each day those whose names had been called as acceptable for O.T. lined up at the elevators. We all had an option of refusal, we could refuse to go down in the elevator for the simplistic occupations that were available to us down there.
Most times I’d decline to go down but then I discovered that I was being monitored badly if I declined. So I started going. I accepted water-colors as the least tedious of the occupations, and for some reason I began to do a water-color of my left hand.
I remember it was just about finished and huge old Dr. Levy came puffing up to me.
“Your little finger isn’t that big, Tom.”
Did he mean that I still suffered from folie de grandeur?
Dr. Levy was the least inhuman of the triumvirate of neurologists and the one who eventually—after I’d survived a month in Violent—transferred me to what is called an “open ward.”
What kept me enduring the confinement at Friggins Division were boxes of books sent to me by Andy Brown of the Gotham Book Mart, and the nightly bridge games that occupied the four hours from dinner till lights out, after I’d been transferred to an open ward. There were several excellent female bridge players in the first open ward I went to. I played every night for about four hours. One of the players was a seventy-five-year-old lady who was being put under a relentless series of shock treatments of which she had mortal terror. She would not know until late evening whether or not she was to be subjected again to a shock treatment in the morning. The notice of it would be posted on the door of her cubicle and she would be shattered, trembling and in tears.
After a shock treatment she had difficulty playing bridge. I remember with a warm feeling how we all ignored her memory failures in the card game and how we all comforted her and tried to assuage her panic when she saw that posted notice of a shock treatment scheduled for the next morning.
She had grown sons who dropped in to see her about once a week; why didn’t they stop this torture of their old mother? I am just cynical enough to suspect they wanted her “out of the way”—and one of them was a professor at St. Louis University, a Catholic institution.
I am happy to report that some months later in Key West I received a postcard from her that stated that she had been released from Friggins Division and was “back home.”
Survival! What an epic capacity of the human heart, young and old!
However dreadful they were at the time of their occurrence, there are incidents and characters whom you recall, at a safe distance, with a shocked amusement. There was, for instance, this great, monolithic black woman who would sit in the center of the dayroom. Whenever I went past her, she would grin at me and say, “You’re so sweet, you’re a lump of sugar, just a sweet lump of sugar.”
Ingenuously, I thought she meant it. And then one day, while delivering this saccharine greeting, she abruptly rose and took a swing at me that would have flattened me on the floor had she not swung off target.
I have incorporated her in my television special Stopped Rocking.
Then there were the two very attractive young ladies who had gone on a bad trip on drugs in Istanbul and who could sleep only if they were given, for sleeping medications, the chemical components known to the underworld as a “Mickey Finn.” Each night when the sleeping medications were passed out, they would stand up to receive their potions. The moment they had downed them, they would start a mad dash for their cubicles, about twenty-five yards away. And invariably they would collapse to the floor before they reached their doors and would have to be dragged unconscious to bed.
Oh, how I envied those girls! I begged Dr. Levy to let me have the same potion, but he said, “No way.”
I was now being permitted to go outside but for at least a month it was only for a walk around the block and I would be followed by a little vehicle from Friggins to make sure that I didn’t attempt an escape.
Toward the very end, I was at last allowed to take a cab into downtown Clayton for an hour.
I went straight to a drugstore and bought a nonprescription box of sleeping pills called Nytol.
I found that it blurred my vision so I gave it up.
Then one day, in downtown Clayton, I went into a doctor’s office, identified myself as Clemence Otte—the name of a brother of my German grandmother—and said that I was in town for a convention and was unable to sleep and would he please prescribe some Seconal for me.
The doctor insisted upon giving me a physical examination. He noted my cardiac trouble and gave me an EKG. After that he wrote me a prescription for exactly three pinkies …
That very same afternoon, when I returned to Friggins, I was summoned to Dr. Levy’s office. He announced that I was to be released the next day, after my confinement of three months.
My first night home, the Christmas holidays, 1969.
Mother and I sat before the downstairs TV to watch a showing of my Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. Mother would not shut up, she chatted all through it despite my continual pleas that she let me hear the dialogue.
Foiled in that, I just sat and watched the grace and tragic style of Vivien Leigh. I think that film is a poem. It was the last important work of both Miss Leigh and of the director, José Quintero, a man who is as dear to my heart as Miss Leigh is.
In the last months of Frankie’s life, Vivien gave a party to which she invited Frankie.
It was his last time out.
Vivien centered the whole dinner party around him with an intuitive sympathy that will always endear her memory to me. She did it without seeming to do it …
Having known madness, she knew how it was to be drawing close to death.
Drawing close to death she was, too, although it was not yet known …
My first night out of Friggins, after the TV show, I asked Mother if I could have a cup of cocoa. She searched endlessly, it seemed, about the kitchen and then she said, “Susie has ‘toted’ it home.”
Susie was her black maid for half a lifetime. And later Mother found the cocoa in the kitchen cupboard.
Poor Susie and poor Miss Edwina!
When Susie went home at night, Mother would loosen the four bolts on the front door, peek out fearfully, then slam the door shut, and cry out to Susie, “Susie, you can’t go yet. There are some blacks on the corner waiting for the bus.”
And one night, Susie laughed and said, “Mizz Williams, none of ’em blacker than me.”
And now Miss Edwina accuses Dakin of keeping “a young black lady” upstairs so she, Miss Edwina, has to remain on the first floor of the house …
Frankie’s enlarged passport photo stares at me from the back of the writ
ing desk: it disturbs me. I turn it face down among the pages of my poem “Old Men Go Mad at Night.”
It is extremely unattractive and humiliating and sleep-destroying to still be at my age a sensualist as well as a romanticist.
Earlier in the day, in fact at noon, I learned that Michael York had read Out Cry, the latest version of it, and had made a verbal commitment to costar in it. There is a difficulty about taxes—but my agent Billy Barnes thinks that he and Merrick can work that out.
Once I was dining at Joe Allen’s with the wise and lovely actress Ruth Ford, who seems to have been born with more worldly wisdom than I have accumulated even at this point in life. I began to speak of my loneliness, the need for a hired companion.
“Hire a companion,” she advised me, “but don’t have him double in bed. You can always find a pickup on the street.”
“Oh, Christ, you don’t understand. There’s nothing emptier, nothing more embarrassing than a street-corner pickup. Usually you get crabs and you’re lucky if you don’t get the clap and each time a little bit of your heart is chipped off and thrown into a gutter.”
She had no answer to that: her beautiful face was enigmatic and grave.
“Then what is the answer,” I asked?
(No change of expression on that noble Southern face.)
So many people seem to have been unable to comprehend why I found it necessary, in the summer of 1971, to sever my professional relationship with Audrey Wood.
The break has been attributed, I suppose, to paranoia, gross ingratitude, and to a general collapse of moral fiber in me. I think I should give you, as honestly as my own perceptions allow, my own side of the story.
It is true that Audrey had represented me from 1939 to 1971, but the representation had somehow worn itself out, during the last ten years of its exceptionally long duration.
Perhaps because of her husband’s failing health, as well as my own alienated life-style and addiction to pills, liquor, and “feel-good” shots, Audrey became, or appeared to me to become, detached from my increasingly desperate circumstances in the sixties.
After Frank’s death, no one was able to help me out of the almost clinical depression into which I sank.
It appeared to me that only Maria made a true effort to provide me with the personal concern that I needed so critically at that time.
The break with Audrey occurred through one of my hysterical “mad scenes” before the opening of a new play. It took place, I am ashamed to say, in the presence of several witnesses, convened in Donald Madden’s dressing room after a preview of an early production of Out Cry at the Ivanhoe Theatre in Chicago, in 1971.
I had worked a very long time on Out Cry and it was especially close to the marrow of my being, wherever that is. The first preview of the play had been attended largely by young people who had given the play, brilliantly performed by Donald Madden and Eileen Herlie, a very heartening response. But it did not seem to me that Audrey responded to the play and its reception that night with any appreciable warmth. If Audrey had not still been so very close and important to me it might not have mattered so much.
The second preview had been pre-empted by a society of theatregoers called something like the Sarah Siddons Sisters. They were mostly matrons with an austere and outdated attitude toward theatrical adventures such as Out Cry. They gave it a very cool reception that night. And—about this I may have been deluded by my inbuilt anxieties—it seemed to me that Audrey was more agreeably affected by the Sarah Siddons reception than by the relative enthusiasm of the younger audience the night before.
In Donald Madden’s dressing room I became a sort of madman. I glared at Audrey and said to her, “You must have been pleased by the audience reaction tonight. You’ve wanted me dead for ten years. But I’m not going to die.”
I did not shout at her, I spoke to her with a quiet ferocity, but it was a dreadful thing for me to say, even though Audrey must have known from long experience the shattered state of my nerves before the official opening of a play in which I am very deeply emotionally involved.
With her customary dignity, she made no response to my outburst in Madden’s dressing room. But she did not remain in Chicago for the opening. She flew back to New York.
Some very wild stories have accrued about that occurrence. It was even said that I had “beaten her up” physically. I protest! I have never struck a woman in my life. (It has also been said that I locked Maria in my bedroom at the Hotel Ambassador East in Chicago and threatened to jump out the window if she tried to escape!)
None of these stories—need I say?—have a grain of truth in them. But certainly much grotesque humor. However, what I did and the way that I did it do very little indeed to reinforce whatever claim I may have to being a dependably rational person on all occasions.
I sincerely doubt that I’ve ever wanted to hurt anyone in my life, but it is all but impossible to go through a lifetime without inflicting hurt on someone, and it is most likely to be a person you care for deeply.
I cared deeply for Audrey and I believe I still do, though to an extent quite naturally reduced by the decade of neglect.
With passing time I trust that those ten years will be dimmed out of my recollections of a truly remarkable woman who has deserved the esteem of the professional world in which she worked and who has been a brilliant representative for some notable writers.
To me she was much like a family member on whom I was particularly dependent. Her reaction to a new piece of my work was always that which first and most concerned me: that is, hers and Kazan’s.
Perhaps if my feelings for her had been limited to professional ones, I would not have been so disturbed and finally so outraged when her concern for me—once so great and sincere, or so it seemed—appeared to ebb, so that I found myself alone as a child lost or an old dog abandoned.…
11
What is it like being a writer? I would say it is like being free.
I know that some writers aren’t free, they are professionally employed, which is quite a different thing.
Professionally, they are probably better writers in the conventional sense of “better.” They have an ear to the ground of best-seller demands: they please their publishers and presumably their public as well.
But they are not free and so they are not what I regard a true writer as being.
To be free is to have achieved your life.
It means any number of freedoms.
It means the freedom to stop when you please, to go where and when you please, it means to be voyager here and there, one who flees many hotels, sad or happy, without obstruction and without much regret.
It means the freedom of being. And someone has wisely observed, if you can’t be yourself, what’s the point of being anything at all?
I am not a frequent reader nor quoter of Scriptures and yet I love a piece of advice which occurs among them:
“Let thy light so shine among men that they see thy good works and glorify thy Father which is in heaven.”
There is a New Journalism, there is a New Criticism, there is a new look and style of cinema and theatre, of practically everything that we live with, but what I think we most need is a New Morality.
And I think we’ve arrived at a point where that is a necessity of continued and bearable existence …
I woke up just now explaining to the dark bedroom, sweetly shared not by a stranger of the night, this very Blanche sort of cry, “Oh, but my heart would break.”
I am sure it was just a sort of Southern extravagance of statement and not a true cri de coeur: and be assured that I do not mean that “a Blanche sort of cry” isn’t or couldn’t be a true cri de coeur. In fact nearly all of her cries to the world in her season of desperation have survived because they were true cries of her embattled heart; that is what gave them the truth which has made them live on, echoing in the hearts of so many known and unknown ladies. But this sounds not like me, not even me in the Victorian Suite. It lacks the hu
mor of Blanche, and it is that humor, along with the truth, that has made a Blanche a relatively imperishable creature of the stage, reincarnated on stage in major productions in recent years, one on the West Coast with Jon Voight as Stanley and one on the East Coast, at Lincoln Center, directed by Ellis Rabb and starring as Blanche his former wife, Rosemary Harris.
This day got off on three wrong feet and does not seem likely to acquire the distinction of a normal tripod, assuming there is such a thing and I take nothing for granted.
I slept late yesterday morning and had to lunch alone in the restaurant downstairs. I killed a half bottle of Chianti Ruffino and went back up to bed. Loneliness assailed me like a wolf pack with rabies, so—lacking my little red address book left in Venice—I had to consult the telephone directory for a madam I knew of, to send over a paid companion. I think he must have read and remembered my story, “Desire and the Black Masseur” as he gave my tired old body the roughest pounding and squeezing I’ve experienced ever.
“Hey, now, I’m not a masochist.”
Well, he had me turn front and back, back and front several times, it went on for an hour and I must confess I began to feel relaxed.
I do have plans for the near future in addition to the inevitable one of death. I will move to Southern Italy or Sicily and I will fulfill my promise to acquire a nice bit of land on which to raise goats and geese and to finish one more play.
I can’t stand the present kind of Italian “borghese” hustlers as exhibited in the north of that phallic peninsula, but I’ll never forget the sweetness of the “contadini,” especially on that occasion when, having quarreled with Frankie, I split for Barcelona in my town-coupe Jaguar with a thermos of martinis and wrapped that elegant car around a tree when a truck swung out of a side road and my car wouldn’t hold the road when I turned to avoid it and my portable Olivetti flew out of the back seat and hit me right smack on the back of my head, knocking me out for I don’t know how long. And I came to and discovered myself surrounded by contadini, nearly all holding toward me in trembling hands their little glasses of vino or liquore and their sweetness and concern.