Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (89 page)

Because the trust owned the copyrights to the plays, St. Just found herself increasingly in a position to give or to deny permission to produce them. She attacked the job with the vindictive enthusiasm she’d brought to her overhaul of Wilbury, her husband’s family estate, once her mother-in-law was dead. (“BANG, BANG, BANG, and out like stout go the following,” she’d written gleefully to Williams about firing the cook, the butler, the pantry boy, and the chambermaid.) Like Mrs. Goforth in
The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore
, St. Just consigned anyone who wouldn’t do her bidding to “the oubliette.” She held sway with such ferocity that even her own solicitor, the legendary fixer Lord Arnold Goodman, told her she was out of line. In his 1993 memoir,
Tell Them I’m on My Way
, Goodman wrote, “She was engaged in vigorous battles to maintain the integrity of various productions, despite my constant remonstrances that it is no part of her duty as a trustee to engage in casting the play. However, remonstrances to Maria are about as futile as persuading a charging bull of the error of its ways.” “Maria was the greatest cheerleader Tennessee Williams will ever have,” Eastman said. “Sometimes cheerleaders aren’t so pretty once you get them off the field.” To those who worked with the estate, however, Eastman seemed only too glad to have St. Just oversee the literary side of Williams’s affairs. “Eastman is perfectly willing to get out of any aspect which is not going to bring in money, which means the literary aspect of it,” Vidal said.

In the most literal sense, St. Just and Eastman fulfilled their mandate as trustees, which was to increase the economic value of the estate. Between 1984, when St. Just and Eastman began to assist the Southeast Banks of Florida in administering the estate, and 1989, Williams’s earnings jumped from $349,000 to $545,000 a year; by 1993, they were up to $809,000 a year. But St. Just had no academic training and no understanding of how a literary reputation is made or sustained. She understood that Williams’s work was a financial asset, but for more than a decade, because of her draconian desire to retain control over literary matters, she managed to freeze almost all critical discourse about it. Williams’s royalties went up, but the discussion of his work went down. Scholars were refused the right to quote from Williams’s unpublished writings, or even to Xerox material from his early papers, which occupy a hundred boxes at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. “These are the people who keep Williams’s reputation alive by writing about him and by teaching him in their classes,” Cathy Henderson, then the librarian who oversaw the collection, wrote to St. Just in 1992. “Denying this group of users the option of doing at least a portion of their research from photocopies discourages critical attention and sets the stage for there being less of an audience for his works.” “Maria wasn’t really interested in the scholarship or the longevity of Williams for the future,” said Elizabeth McCann, the American co-producer of Sir Peter Hall’s 1989 revival of
Orpheus Descending
. “She was only interested in what was in it for her. Now. This moment.”

In the first nine months after Williams’s death, St. Just tried to stop many of the productions that the Southeast Banks of Florida had approved, including a cable-TV production of
Streetcar
with Ann-Margret—a project that had been initiated in Williams’s lifetime. Two months after Williams’s death, Ed Sherin—who held both a letter of support from Williams for a mooted second 1983–84 production of
The Red Devil Battery Sign
and the agreement of Shirley Knight to play Woman Downtown—wrote to St. Just for permission to mount the play at the Hartman Theatre in Stamford, Connecticut, where he was the artistic director. St. Just said no. If he was shocked that she’d made other plans for the play, St. Just wrote, pissing on him from a great height, she was shocked that he hadn’t expressed any sympathy for the tragic loss of her beloved Tennessee.

Rocco Landesman, then head of New York’s Jujamcyn Theaters, approached St. Just about using Williams’s name for a Broadway theater. “I wanted to name what is now the Walter Kerr Theatre after Tennessee,” Landesman said. “I called Maria St. Just. She talked quite a lot and listened not at all. The gist of the conversation was that if we’d produce ‘Orpheus Descending’ on Broadway, she’d arrange this. Which was too bad, because Tennessee would have had the most beautiful theater in New York named after him. But I wouldn’t submit to blackmail.”

Because of St. Just’s bow-wow caprice,
Something Cloudy, Something Clear
, a play she disliked because it was “homosexual,” wasn’t published until 1995.
A House Not Meant to Stand
wasn’t published until 2008. Gregory Mosher, who had moved from being the artistic director of the Goodman Theatre in Chicago to running the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, offered the estate a major New York production of
A House
, which St. Just declined. “She said, ‘The play is not doable,’ ” Mosher recalled. “I said, ‘You didn’t even see it. How do you know if it’s doable or not?’ ” St. Just was charming and biddable when seasoned British directors, such as Peter Hall or Richard Eyre, came calling, but younger directors who lacked Hall’s and Eyre’s cachet and charm were in for heavy weather. Simon Curtis, then the head of BBC television drama, tried to persuade St. Just to let him produce
Stopped Rocking
. “She pretended an awful lot,” Curtis recalled. “ ‘Who’s going to write the screenplay?’ she said to me. ‘It
is
a screenplay,’ I said.”

Since St. Just’s public persona was an elaborate house of cards, any scrutiny was a threat, and she was determined to have a say in the choice of Williams’s biographer. “His personal image has been appallingly tarnished,” she said, of the spate of inadequately researched memoirs about Williams—including his own—that emphasized drink, drugs, and homosexual promiscuity. “I explained to her, ‘All you care about is how you come out of the story,’ ” Gore Vidal said. “ ‘Any biographer will give you the right to censor anything about yourself, since the biography is not of Maria but of Tennessee.’ ” Many biographers were called, and one was chosen. Margot Peters, the author of biographies of Charlotte Brontë and the Barrymore family, worked on a Williams biography from 1989 to 1991. The process did not go smoothly. “She definitely wanted to vet the manuscript,” Peters said of St. Just. “I just kept telling her, ‘Maria, this is my own biography. You’re giving me the rights, but it’s mine. I can’t work if you’re going to vet the manuscript.’ There were some things that she wouldn’t even let me examine. First I could use quotes, then perhaps I couldn’t.” The project was off; then it was on again. Finally, the two women parted ways in a bitter transatlantic phone call. “I would never trust you with him,” St. Just told Peters. Peters screamed at St. Just, “You have ruined Tennessee Williams! You’re ruining him! You’re ruining his reputation! You’re ruining scholarship for him! I wouldn’t work on him or with you for anything in this world!” And she slammed the phone down.

St. Just, an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, adopted the former prime minister’s tactic when faced with opposition: she took no prisoners. Obliteration, not negotiation, was her style. She never mentioned—not even to the “authorized” Peters—that for five years prior to his death, Williams had cooperated with Lyle Leverich, who was planning a two-part biography and who possessed two letters from Williams naming him the authorized biographer and allowing him “full access to my private correspondence and journals.” Williams had first met Leverich in 1976, when Leverich was managing a small San Francisco theater called The Showcase, which successfully produced
The Two-Character Play
. The following year, Leverich wrote a long letter to the
New York
Times
in response to Robert Brustein’s review of
Tennessee Williams’ Letters to Donald Windham: 1940-1965
, and Williams wrote to thank him for his support. The next year, over dinner, Leverich suggested that Williams’s own
Memoirs
had done him a disservice, and proposed that a book be written about Williams’s work in the theater, whereupon Williams said, “Baby, you write it!” In January 1979, Williams instructed Bill Barnes to represent Leverich. Subsequently, he decided that Leverich should be his biographer—a task that Leverich, who had never written a book, accepted. In 1984, shortly after Williams died, Charles Carroll confirmed Leverich as Williams’s official biographer.

Leverich worked on his first volume—
Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams
—in ten years of relative tranquility. The book was scheduled to be published by Grove Weidenfeld in the fall of 1991. By mid-1988, however, Williams’s will had come out of probate, and St. Just had ascended to her self-appointed role as Williams’s literary guardian. She set out to retroactively deny Leverich permission to publish, on the grounds that Williams’s two letters of authorization did not specifically say that Leverich could quote from correspondence and journals. Leverich contended that he had indeed obtained the required approval from the Southeast Banks of Florida, and had proceeded in good faith since then, but St. Just dismissed Leverich’s work as just another “pirate book.” She took up the matter with Andreas Brown, the owner of the Gotham Book Mart and an appraiser of literary archives who had been hired by Audrey Wood in the sixties to catalogue and appraise Williams’s papers and had resumed the task after Williams’s death. In a letter, St. Just upbraided Brown for helping Leverich and assured him that Leverich would never be the authorized biographer. Brown wrote back to say that he had helped Leverich on Williams’s instructions. Nonetheless, even though Leverich’s publishers thought he had a good case, they were not willing to take on a potentially expensive crusade against the quixotic Lady St. Just. Plans to publish were dropped, and the book was kicked into the long grass.

In another letter to Brown, St. Just laid the responsibility for the estate’s hard line on James Laughlin, to whom Leverich had submitted an early draft of his manuscript for comment. Laughlin returned the manuscript in the spring of 1989, claiming that he was unable to read it because he was coping with fire damage to his Connecticut home. He added, however, that he didn’t think it would “fit into Maria’s plans,” because “she wants something far shorter and with a different slant.” Subsequently, Laughlin wrote to the estate’s lawyer about the biography: “I admired the depth of its research but did not feel that the book had the literary qualities requisite for designation as an authorized biography of Tennessee Williams.”

What had happened? Brown, who knew both Leverich and Laughlin well, wanted to know. “As I recall,” he wrote to Laughlin on June 27, 1990, “Lyle submitted his early unedited draft to you for general comment, not as a screening process for Maria and the estate to accept or reject Lyle’s work as ‘authorized.’ Further, I do not recall your saying at any time during those occasions when the two of us discussed Lyle and his manuscript that you had concluded that his biography did not ‘warrant’ authorization.” Brown got his explanation from Laughlin on a handwritten postcard, postmarked July 5: “The answer is spelled blackmail. Sorry!” St. Just had played her ace. As the holder of the copyrights, she could choose to move any future Williams books to another publishing house or to block Laughlin’s plan to publish a volume of Williams’s letters to him. In May 1992, Laughlin wrote to Leverich, “I must remain friends with the estate because we have business to do with them, but I don’t like the censorship bit at all.”

Others, including Vidal, lobbied St. Just on behalf of Leverich and academic freedom. “I’ve denounced her,” Vidal said. “I’ve bawled her out. She knew (a) that he was very thorough and (b) that he was onto the abortion thing. And I said, ‘Everybody has abortions, for chrissake. What’s the big deal? It’s not as though you’re in line to be Queen of England, and this might be bad P.R. You’re just an actress—actresses go in for that sort of thing.’ ” Taking matters into her own hands, St. Just went to the Williams archive at the Harry Ransom Center, in Austin, and demanded, as his literary executor, that she be allowed to read his letters alone in a private room. With a razor, she cut out any incriminating words in Williams’s letters. (She didn’t realize, however, that the library kept microfiche copies of every document and could access the excised content.) Leverich wrote to St. Just and offered to “submit for your review and comment” any sensitive material he had uncovered. She never replied. “Maria wreaked havoc on this man’s life,” Brown said. “It’s a real moral crime.”

In 1994, the year of St. Just’s death, and at the end of a three-month
New Yorker
magazine inquiry into the Williams Estate’s fiduciary and literary high jinx, John Eastman finally allowed Leverich’s biography to proceed to publication. Thirteen years after Williams was buried, the conversation between America’s greatest playwright and the world he’d once bustled in could properly begin. The results of this reinvigorated discussion could be seen at the box office. In 2000, there were 246 productions of Williams’s plays, which earned a total of $1.15 million; by 2011, the number of worldwide productions had risen to 309, and the receipts to $1.4 million.

IN HIS STRUGGLE to unlearn repression, to claim his freedom, and to forge glory out of grief, Williams turned his own delirium into one of the twentieth century’s great chronicles of the brilliance and the barbarity of individualism. In order to name our pain, he devoured himself:

. . . this much will be clear as any of his lost mornings,

that he did own one essential part of a hero,

the idea of life as a nothing-withholding submission of self to flame.

Out of the sad little wish to be loved, Williams made characters so large that they became part of American folklore. Blanche, Stanley, Big Daddy, Brick, Amanda, and Laura transcend their stories—sensational ghosts who haunt us through the ages with their fierce, flawed lives. Williams allowed words to live like anthems in the national imagination: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers”; “Sometimes—there’s God—so quickly”; “Nowadays the world is lit by lightning”; “
Make voyages!
—
Attempt them!
—there’s nothing else.”