Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (17 page)

“Tennessee, honey, that boy is wonderful, you are lucky to have him with you!” McCullers said.

Williams was, he said, “by no means convinced of this”; in time, neither was McCullers. Nonetheless, “they went home and set up housekeeping.” McCullers cooked “spuds Carson”—olives and onions mashed with the potatoes—and pea soup with hot dogs. At night, she played Bach and Schubert on the upright piano in the living room. Sometimes she and Williams listened to Sousa marches on a windup Victrola or read Hart Crane to each other. During the day, they sat at opposite ends of a long table and wrote together—he finishing
Summer and Smoke
, she beginning the stage adaptation of
The Member of the Wedding
. For his part, Williams said, “Carson is the only person I’ve ever been able to stand in the same room with me when I’m working.” McCullers was equally grateful and gracious. “I feel you are a true collaborator in this work,” she wrote to him when it was finished two years later, “and the credit should be acknowledged.”

With Carson McCullers, 1946

“Pancho was subdued for a while,” Williams said. Inevitably, however, the intimacy Williams and McCullers found between them—their reading, their writing, their shared Southern associations—inspired envy. Pancho began to throw spoiling scenes. “My friend Pancho has been cooking and keeping the house for me which has been a saving,” Williams wrote to Audrey Wood in the autumn. “But he is now in a mysterious Mexican rage and has packed his trunk intending to leave for Mexico. I think it is partly because of Carson’s presence. He resents the fact that we have long literary conversations which he does not understand. This situation is also upsetting. Carson is so vague that she does not appear to notice it.” Williams did; in a letter to Pancho he tried to reason him out of his unreasonableness:

1) As you ought to know, I have no one else in my emotional life and have no desire for anyone else.

2) I have never thought of you as being

by me. That is all an invention of your own. If we were man and woman, it would be very clear and simple, we would be married and simply sharing our lives and whatever we have with each other. That is what I had thought we were actually doing. When I say “Pancho is doing the cooking and the house-work” I am only saying that Pancho is being kind enough to help me, and knowing me as you do, you should realize that that is the only way in which I could possibly mean it.

3) This is a dark, uncertain period we are passing through and a time when we ought to stand beside each other with faith and courage and the belief that we have the power in us to come back out in the light.

4) I love you as I have never loved anyone else in my life.

5) You are not only my love but also my luck. For 3 months I have lived in a dark world of anxiety, inexpressible even to you, which has made me seem different—You may not have guessed this, but you are about the only thing that has kept me above the water.

Over the next year, as part of Williams’s strategy of pacification, Pancho was brought into increasing contact with the A-list to which Williams was a new fixture. “When Tennessee would mention, ‘I want you to meet my friend Pancho Rodriguez,’ they expected a little Mexican boy with a sombrero,” Pancho recalled, who saw himself as “very proud, I thought I knew everything.” His efforts to appease Pancho’s insecurity bought Williams anything but an easy life. Pancho’s arrogance and fragility were a toxic combination. When Pancho went with Williams and McCullers to tea with Katharine Cornell and her director husband Guthrie McClintic, who were expecting “Chart of Anatomy” to be a vehicle for her, McClintic took “a violent dislike” to him. Among these distinguished theatricals, Pancho became a subject of scandal and concern, “the Mexican problem,” as Williams himself was finally forced to concede to Margo Jones. McCullers smelled a gold digger and an impediment to Williams’s creative life. “Don’t, for God’s sake, be unhinged by Pancho. You must protect yourself,” she wrote him. Paul Bigelow reported her high anxiety to his companion Jordan Massie, who was McCullers’s distant cousin. “Carson says that Ten’s Mexican has imported his whole family from Texas into Louisiana and they are all living in New Orleans in the greatest
gemutlicheit!
” Bigelow added, “Tennessee has not only acquired an old man of the sea, he has acquired the old man’s descendants, and I know that class of Mexican, especially of the border region, is wily and shrewd and almost impossible to be rid of.”

Even Dakin Williams, when he came to visit Williams in 1946, got a taste of Pancho’s transgressive behavior. As he was undressing for the night, Pancho—Dakin claimed—had come into his bedroom. “I had peeled down to my jockey shorts,” he said. “Seating himself on my bed, immediately next to me, he draped his arm over my shoulder, giving me a friendly pinch on the nipple. ‘Dakin, I want you to sleep with me tonight.’ ” “Dakin stayed up all night shaking and being very nervous and saying the rosary,” Pancho recalled. “He was afraid I would do something, I guess.” After the visit, Dakin wrote Williams about Pancho. He was not, he said, “an asset to you socially” and “has all the attributes of . . . well . . . you know what.” The letter, in which Dakin asked, “How can you do this to me and to our family?” earned a blistering reply from Williams; according to Dakin, it “had the predictable effect of terminating the warm brotherly relationship that had once existed between us.”

As reports of Williams’s ill health and his struggle with “Chart of Anatomy” began to reach her, Audrey Wood became increasingly paranoid about Pancho’s insidious influence. She gave credence to rumors that Pancho was poisoning her client. “No amount of reassurance on my part can quite remove the fear that Tenn may actually be in some sort of danger,” wrote Bigelow, whom the Liebling-Wood agency had asked to go to New Orleans to winkle out the dark truth. “She resented me,” Rodriguez said. “She was afraid I might destroy Williams through my behavior.”

At the end of the summer, after checking himself into Manhattan’s St. Luke’s Hospital in a vain search for pancreatic cancer, Williams included Pancho in his professional meetings with Audrey Wood, which outraged her. In October, according to Rodriguez, the shy Williams asked him to raise the issue of foreign royalties over dinner. “ ‘Audrey, what happened to the money from the royalties,’ ” Rodriguez said with characteristic bluntness. “She looked at me and said, ‘Why are you asking me that?’ Audrey never forgot that again. She was very wary of me.” Rodriguez continued, “From then on there was a campaign to get rid of me.” Wood saw Pancho as a threat to both Tennessee’s livelihood and her own.

“Audrey wanted to ask my advice again as to whether she should lecture Tennessee about his folly in insisting on allowing Pancho to be present at all interviews and to take him out of the country, just now when the moving picture arrangements are just being defined,” Bigelow wrote to Massie regarding the long drawn-out film negotiations for
The Glass Menagerie
, about which Pancho had high-handedly criticized Wood for dawdling. Certainly, Pancho was familiarizing himself with Williams’s deals and dollars. Although the gossip columnist Louella Parsons broke the news to the nation about the half-million-dollar sale of
The Glass Menagerie
to Hollywood, it was Pancho on a cardboard record cut in New Orleans on October 17, 1946, who proudly broadcast the terms of the actual contract. “A deal has been completed by Charles [Feldman] for the film rights to ‘The Glass Menagerie’. It was done yesterday. The four character play, written by Tennessee Williams, the Broadway playwright, will bring $400,000 against 8 and 2/3 percent of the feature’s net profits, plus 1 and 1/3 percent of the $400,000. One half of the $400,000 advanced payment is to be paid when the contract is signed and the remainder next January 16.”

Whatever the exact figures—the price was the highest yet paid for a Broadway play—Williams was suddenly a rich man. Wood feared that Pancho might exploit Williams’s loyalty to him and seize his literary interests out from under her. “It was an error of incalculable magnitude for Tenn to let Audrey know in such a way that she had to acknowledge it, his relationship with Pancho,” Bigelow wrote to Massie. He went on, “Liebling feels that if Audrey goes there she will immediately arouse Pancho’s suspicions and perhaps cause the removal of Tenn’s entire work from that agency. . . . I know Audrey is disturbed because Tenn is producing no work. She told me at breakfast a week ago . . . that the new play is only a sketch for a play and that it is all Tenn has written in two years. For a careful intellectual writer, that would not be surprising or alarming, for Tenn it is catastrophic, for it means that his great impulse toward written expression is either weakening or may die, or that he is so deeply troubled and un-channeled by emotional conflict that no expression of any sort is possible for him. . . . Naturally I am worried about these accounts of Tenn and Pancho.”

“I was jealous of all of them,” Rodriguez said. “I didn’t want for him to get close to anybody else. I suspected everybody wanted to take him away from me.” Whenever Pancho felt his access to Williams blocked, he lashed out. One night in Nantucket, after an argument with Williams, he returned home drunk. The front door was locked. From the upstairs light, he could tell that Williams was in bed reading. “He didn’t answer my call to open the door,” Rodriguez said. Finally, Pancho found his keys. “I walked in, and I started to break all the light bulbs in the house.” Williams, who had provoked the incident, subsequently used it as a detail of passion in
A Streetcar Named Desire
.

However, Williams waited until
Memoirs
to dramatize the collateral damage of another of Pancho’s scenes in May 1947. “You take your friends out of here before I throw them out,” Pancho told Williams, who was entertaining Donald Windham and his partner the actor Sandy Campbell in their room at the Royalton in New York. Instead of returning after thirty minutes as he’d promised, two hours later Williams was still drinking with his friends in the lobby of the Algonquin. Pancho loudly approached them. Williams asked for the check; Pancho shouted for the waiter to bring everyone’s check separately. “We’re the sugar daddies!” Pancho said, turning to Windham. “Well, did you get another three hundred dollars out of Mr. Williams?” “Pancho, you aren’t jealous of me, are you?” Windham said. “Jealous of you!” Pancho shouted. “I think you and Sandy are two of the biggest whores who ever appeared on Broadway!”

According to Windham, “Tenn . . . disappeared behind a screen at the end of the lobby, while Pancho continued about how low I was and how Tennessee supported everyone. When the waiter arrived Tenn appeared and paid the check, left a dollar in change for the tip, and fled. Pancho, without ceasing his monologue, dumped the change from the tray onto the table. ‘Is this for me?’ the waiter asked. ‘No, this is for you,’ Pancho said, pushing over a quarter and pocketing seventy-five cents.” During the scene Pancho taunted Williams and Windham. “You ought to see your room now, Mr. Williams. Maybe you two ought to go over and see it together. You’re both writers, maybe you can make a story out of it.”

The Royalton room and most of Williams’s possessions had been trashed. “A portable typewriter borrowed from Audrey had been smashed,” Williams wrote to Windham, enclosing Pancho’s first-ever note of apology. “A new suit and hat torn to shreds, all my books torn up, vase and glasses smashed. For some reason he neglected to attack my manuscripts. Of course if he had I would have thrown him in jail and perhaps he knew it. Altogether about one hundred and fifty dollars worth of damages! I am taking it out of his allowance—gradually.” He added, “When you analyze his behavior, it becomes so pitiful it makes you more tearful than angry. He has never had any security or comfort or affection and he thinks that the way to hold it is by standing over it with tooth and claw like a wild-cat!”

In the grueling last months of 1946, as Williams wrestled “Chart of Anatomy” into shape, Pancho’s most potent rival was Williams’s work. Like Amada in “Rubio y Morena,” Pancho seemed to exist for Williams “on the other side of a center which was his writing. Everything outside of that existed in a penumbra as shadowy forms on the further side of a flame.” Pancho didn’t deal well with Williams’s self-absorption. Williams had quiet days to write; however, the evenings brought “the always turbulent return of Pancho from his day’s work at the clothing store.”

“SITUATION OF MY psyche remains nightmarish,” Williams confided to his diary in November. He added, “The iron jaws of a trap seem to hold me here in a little corner, backing away from panic. I cling to little palliative devices—the swimming pool-the sleeping tablets-reading in bed-sometimes movies-the familiarity of Pancho.” The sense of collapse that beset Williams signaled anxiety about his play and about Pancho. Williams stopped having sex, or wanting it, which worried him. “The nightingales can’t sing anymore. They just died on the branches. And it’s all a bit useless here.” Even though the doctors whom he consulted during these months continued to tell him that he did not have cancer, in his weakness, burning stomach, and abdominal twinges, his body seemed to act out his dread. “Nausea persists,” he wrote in his December diary. “Dr. Sullivan seems bored and impatient and offers no suggestion except that I see a psychiatrist.” In his own self-analysis, Williams admitted to Audrey Wood, “Undoubtedly a lot of my symptoms are what is called ‘psychosomatic.’ I get depressed about my work or something and feel as if I were about to give up the ghost.” He added, “Miss Alma has been an ordeal. I have gotten so tired of her.”