Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (52 page)

CC was never so generous in the family home as he was when he was leaving it. Despite her newfound wealth from
The Glass Menagerie
royalties, CC gave Edwina their charming two-story Georgian house in St. Louis and a tranche of stock in the International Shoe Company, from which he had retired in 1945. “So a tragic situation works itself out, a little too late, but better than never at all,” Williams wrote at the time. “As for the old man, he has probably suffered as much as anyone, possibly even more, and I am afraid it will be a lonely and bitter end to his blind and selfish life.” CC decamped to his sister Isabel’s home in Knoxville, then, when she couldn’t handle him, to a hotel at a resort outside the city called Whittle Springs, where he lived out his days. “My father was really quite an embarrassment to me at this time,” Dakin recalled. “He would be dead drunk in the hotel room. He would ask me to take him to Gulfport or Knoxville in my car. I would have to practically shovel him out of the hotel. He would gradually sober up on the trip.”

After CC left St. Louis, Edwina never saw him again. Although both of her sons attended their father’s funeral—“I was surprised that Tennessee came because of his feelings about my father,” Dakin said—Edwina did not. In her memoir, she pictured him dying alone, drunk in a hotel room; in fact, CC, who had found a female companion in his last years, a widow from Toledo, Ohio, died at St. Mary’s Hospital from complications from asthma. In Edwina’s version of events, the children cast a cold eye on their father. “Dakin told me, ‘Neither Tom nor I shed a tear,’ ” Edwina wrote. In truth, both Dakin and Tennessee cried over their father. “The Williams family was not one of the best families in Tennessee. It was
the
best family,” Williams’s Aunt Isabel used to say. But the gene of distinction had passed CC by. In his life, CC held no public office, wrote no poems, fought no battles except an ongoing humiliating war with his diminutive wife, who conquered him. He left his car to his autumn love; he left the modest remainder of his estate to his sister, his daughter, and Dakin. To Williams, he left nothing. “I wonder if he knew, and I suspect he did, that he had left me something far more important, which was his blood in my veins,” Williams wrote in his autobiographical essay “The Man in the Overstuffed Chair.” “And, of course I wonder, too, if there wasn’t more love than hate in his blood, however tortured it was.”

CC was laid to rest in “Old Gray,” as the Knoxville Cemetery was called. Williams remembered it as “an exceptionally beautiful service.” Afterward, sitting on the Williams family tombstone, the disinherited son whom CC had called “Miss Nancy” signed autographs for his father’s mourners.

ORPHEUS DESCENDING
CLOSED after sixty-eight performances.

“Am I wrong in thinking that if you had directed ‘Orpheus’ it would have been one of our greatest successes?” Williams wrote to Kazan that April. “I don’t think so. I think your appreciation of its basic truth would have inspired me to lift it above its theatricalism.” Williams continued, “You could have staged the ending so it would play and score. You would have found the ‘key’ in which the play is written, not just intellectually but with an artist’s and poet’s vision, and gotten a stunning performance from Maureen all the way through.”

“Tenn became a terrific hypochondriac that spring,” Maureen Stapleton recalled. “He tried to act very bravely with us during the short run of ‘Orpheus’—he was always trying to cheer us up, make us laugh when it was hard to laugh.” Stapleton went on, “His paranoia could surface at the most unexpected times. More than once, we sat at a restaurant table and he would overhear someone nearby say something uncomplimentary—and invariably Tenn thought it was about him. And he’d be ready for a fistfight to defend an imaginary insult!” Williams had reached “a certain stop, or point of departure, in my professional life,” he confided to Atkinson after the show opened. The loss of his father, to his surprise, made him even more convinced that he had come to some kind of turning point. “Since the failure of ‘Orpheus’ my stock has fallen enormously,” Williams wrote to St. Just in June. His spirits had fallen just as precipitously. “What a season we’ve been having, Madam!” he told Wood. “A few more like it and we’ll be ready for the glue factory or the soap works.” Feeling that “I can’t be the better part of myself anymore,” Williams was finally ready for the psychiatrist’s couch. “The moment has certainly come for psychiatric help, but will I take it?” he asked his diary.

CHAPTER 6

Beanstalk Country

Who am I?

A wounded man, badly bandaged,

a monster among angels or angel among monsters . . .

—

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS,

“You and I”

On April Fool’s Day in 1957, Williams found himself at the Starlite Lounge in Miami, nursing a third double-bourbon with the hard-drinking poet Gilbert Maxwell and Richard Leavitt, a new acquaintance who would become a friend and, in 1978, publish a biographical album about his life. Williams was having a good time. “I announced that I was retiring from the professional theatre and going to devote myself to friendship and a good, simple life in New Orleans, with analysis,” he wrote in his diary. Then, he added, “Bull!—How on earth do I know what I’m going to do, except that it’s fairly plain that I will go on drinking and drinking and
drinking
, and having a good time in bed whenever I can and hitting the keys on my new ‘Olympia’ typewriter—a good one.”

By the end of May, however, Williams, carrying through on one part of his announcement, put himself into the care of the distinguished, sixty-one-year-old, New York–based psychiatrist Lawrence S. Kubie. Educated at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the London Institute of Psychoanalysis, Kubie was one of the leaders in a cluster of creative neurologists who saw early on the value and impact of psychoanalysis. A man of astringent and wide-ranging intellect—“He reminded me of Thomas Wolfe, who wanted to live every life, have every experience, be with every person,” the psychoanalyst Eugene Brody wrote in
Symbol and Neurosis
, a collection of Kubie’s papers published after his death in 1973—Kubie had been practicing his brand of Freudian psychology in New York since 1930. By the time Williams went to him, he had been president of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, he had taught at Columbia and Yale, and he was on the staff of Mt. Sinai Hospital. The author of three hundred psychoanalytic papers, reviews, and numerous books, among them a volume titled
Neurotic Distortion of the Creative Process
, Kubie was erudite, sophisticated, enthusiastic, and something of an intellectual maverick, whose often-repeated mantra was “The tree of psychoanalytic theory needs drastic pruning!”

Lawrence Kubie, psychiatrist

Williams was a daunting analytic challenge: a borderline personality with tenacious addictive and depressive tendencies who was rich, famous, and a genius to boot. Many analysts would not have wanted to risk their reputations on such a quixotic, disturbed figure. But within the psychoanalytic and artistic communities, Kubie was the man—an expert at containing and commanding talented people lumbered with chronic personality disorders, especially those coping with homosexual issues. Many of the literary and theatrical stars of the day were Kubie’s patients: William Inge, Leonard Bernstein, Charles Jackson (
The Lost Weekend
), Laura Z. Hobson (
Gentleman’s Agreement
), Josh Logan, Vladimir Horowitz (who credited Kubie with “curing” him of homosexuality), Moss Hart, and Kurt Weill. (Kubie actually introduced Hart to Weill; the result was
Lady in the Dark
, a musical about psychiatry in which Kubie, with his “Harvard” accent and precise diction, was given fictional form.)

From the outset, Kubie’s treatment of Williams was special. He judged his patient too disturbed to begin analysis immediately and insisted that he first dry out and undergo medical examinations for a few days at the expensive Harkness Pavilion. Pending the Harkness test results, Williams was to undergo a period of seclusion at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, an open therapeutic community for severely troubled patients. (Kubie would publish a history of the place in 1960.) In those days, the Austen Riggs regimen involved a minimum stay of one year, during which the patient saw a psychiatrist three times a week and busied himself the rest of the time with such salubrious activities as painting, acting, walking, and writing, though the last item on the list was off limits in Kubie’s program for Williams.

Kubie’s approach for Williams involved cutting off all his addictions: drink, men, travel, and writing. This strategy of deprivation was a classical Freudian maneuver, predicated on the assumption that Williams’s addictions were a form of acting out. “What is cut off will depend on which activity has been used persistently as a major escape from inner problems,” Kubie wrote in
Practical and Theoretical Aspects of Psychoanalysis
(1950). Kubie’s prescription of abstinence was mocked, by Vidal and other gay friends, as a clinical method of transforming Williams into “a good team-player.” In fact, the deprivation was intended to force Williams’s neurotic drives to find other routes of expression, specifically through interpretation during analysis—acting in, so to speak, instead of acting out. In his writing, Kubie preached the hard line he practiced on Williams:

The psychoanalyst . . . will be tactful and judicious in his warnings, but in the end he must be merciless in forcing a patient to face his neurosis. Indeed, just as he must sometimes intervene actively to produce situations of deprivation, so he often has to tumble the patient into those very situations that arouse his fears, depression, and anger.

“I don’t think I can stand much of it,” Williams wrote, from his hospital bed at the Harkness Pavilion, of his “exquisite boredom.” “Can do without the liquor and that’s undoubtedly a wise move but—(interruption!?) Well—the boredom vanished when the two Docs entered and I felt suddenly
trapped
. Heart began doing flip-flops. I was nearly panicky.” He went on, “I guess I’ve been hiding from this a long time, dodging,
cheating
kidding myself but maybe it’s better, now, to have to collide with it, face to face, head on—Gosh, I’m downright incoherent.”

Williams left the Harkness Pavilion on June 7, 1957, still uncertain whether surrendering himself to doctors and clinics would be his “salvation.” Torn between facing his problems and fleeing them, he chose flight—a brief excursion to Havana, Cuba, “my favorite city in the Americas.” En route, he “goofed” and fell off the wagon. “With the plane trip as an excuse (not a good one), I had at least 8 drinks during the day and had 3 Seconals, one before the flight and two later, combating an intense depression that had fallen over me,” he wrote in his diary. Havana’s sensuality worked its anodyne magic. In a letter to Kazan, Williams boasted that he’d cut down his drinking and “rarely take[s] more than one goofball a day.” “The swimming and the fucking are wonderful here,” he wrote. “It’s cool summer weather, and the Cubans are socially compatible to me, they are bird-brains that sing like birds, especially for their supper, and don’t seem to resent it. The revolution is very inconspicuous, and not at all scary to me. Sometimes I wish they would mistake me for an enemy and take an accurate pot-shot at me on the Prado. But most of the time I am happy enough to be at large.” He added, “I am going on with my work, against the doctor’s advice.”

But during this Cuban interlude, Williams dropped his game face only for Merlo, to whom he had sent out an SOS. Kubie, he wrote, “had knocked me out so completely I couldn’t put the pieces together again. For the first time, I’ve really been afraid that I was about to go out of my mind. I guess I am really going through a nervous breakdown. I couldn’t ask you to help me because you’re going through something similar, although, being much stronger, you have a lot more control.” He added, “Perhaps the good Dr. Kubie can explain what’s happened. I honestly can’t guess!”

After this capriciousness, Williams set out on June 18 for Austen Riggs. For three nights prior to his departure, he had nightmares about it. To Maria St. Just, he referred to the institution as “a plush-lined loony-bin”; to Audrey Wood, however, he characterized it as “a Christian Retreat,” “from which I hope to emerge a better Christian,” he wrote, adding by hand, “less ‘retreating’!!” Chauffeured by Merlo, Williams rolled up to Stockbridge from New York, ready to commit. But the collective doom of the other residents spooked him. “I stayed only five minutes in the Institute,” he wrote to his mother the following week. “I took one look at the other patients and told Frank to carry my bags right back out to the car. I checked into the local hotel and stayed there over the weekend to make sure that this was not the place for me, then drove back to New York.” He went on, “I think the psychiatrist, Dr. Kubie . . . is right in thinking I need some therapy of that kind to relieve the tensions that I have been living under, but I think it’s unnecessary for me to live in a house full of characters that appeared to be more disturbed than myself.”