Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (54 page)

Suddenly Last Summer
was a sort of autobiographical exorcism that worked through Williams’s grief and guilt over his sister, Rose, as well as his anger at Edwina for deciding to allow a bilateral prefrontal lobotomy to be performed on her without informing him in advance about the procedure—an omission for which Williams never forgave his mother. (“
Do you want to bore a hole in my skull and turn a knife in my brain?
” Catharine challenges Dr. Sugar, adding, “You’d have to have my mother’s permission for that.”) “Now that it’s over, I can tell you about Rose who has successfully come through a head operation,” Edwina wrote to Williams on January 20, 1943. “What kind of operation was it and what was it for?” he replied on January 25. “Please let me know exactly what was done with Rose.”

Elizabeth Taylor as Catharine Holly in the film
Suddenly, Last Summer
, 1959

In Miss Edwina’s memoir, the date of the lobotomy was strategically fudged. By implying that the operation took place when Rose was first committed, in 1937, rather than nearly six years later, Edwina shifted the blame for the decision onto CC, who “had given up on Rose” and on himself, as his increasingly chronic boozing indicated. “The psychiatrists convinced Cornelius the only answer was a lobotomy,” Edwina wrote, adding, “They tried to make me believe this was the only hope for Rose, that otherwise she would spend the rest of her days a raving maniac in a padded cell.” In fact, what doctors had told CC was that the “only hope” was insulin treatments, which began to be administered at Farmington State Hospital, in Missouri, about seventy miles from St. Louis, on August 23, 1937. The insulin did not work, however. By August 1939, Rose’s condition, if anything, had gotten worse: “Does no work. Manifests delusions of persecution. Smiles and laughs when telling of person plotting to kill her. . . . Admits auditory hallucinations. Quiet on the ward. Masturbates frequently. Also expresses various somatic delusions, all of which she explains on a sexual basis. Memory for remote past is nil.”

Some part of Rose’s unraveling
could
be blamed on CC, who, even the psychiatrist’s report acknowledged, “has been eccentric most of his life.” CC was always distant with Rose. “Any of the normal hugging or kissing between father and daughter would have embarrassed him, as it would have been discouraged by Edwina,” Lyle Leverich writes in
Tom
. Rose never held a job, which only compounded CC’s aloofness. In his mind, she was an economic burden who became an existential catastrophe. Over the years, his explosive scenes, his threats to leave the family, his drizzle of denigration unnerved and infuriated Rose, who began to show signs of erratic behavior at twenty-one. It was not uncommon for Rose, in front of guests, to accuse her parents of sexual immorality. She conceived the fantastical notion that Edwina was leading an immoral double life. “I remember her stalking into the front room one day, eyes ablaze, and shouting at Mother: ‘I know what you are doing and you are no better than a prostitute. You are keeping another apartment to have affairs with Dad’s salesmen and you have a complete wardrobe there, you are practically a streetwalker and I am going to tell Dad!’ ” Williams told Oliver Evans in 1971. He added, “I think Rose was getting back at Mother for all those repressions which Mother forced upon Rose and which resulted in her breakdown.”

Rose’s scenes became increasingly sensational. On her way to a psychiatrist’s office, she put a knife in her handbag; once, shortly before she was hospitalized, she wandered into Williams’s room saying, “Let’s all die together.” In an attempt to stabilize her volatile and increasingly dissociated behavior, Rose’s parents sent her to stay with CC’s sisters in Knoxville over the Christmas holidays in 1936. The visit was not a particular success. Because of local flooding while she was traveling back to St. Louis a few weeks later, Rose was forced to sleep overnight at the Louisville train station “with refugees.” She became agitated and began to rave as soon as she got home. Edwina wrote to her parents, “Cornelius . . . lost his temper, told her she was crazy and that he was going to put her in the State Asylum. He will do this too, if I don’t do something else with her.”

That March, Rose was committed to the psychiatric ward of Missouri Baptist Hospital and subsequently transferred on April 15 to St. Vincent’s, a Catholic convalescent home. Dakin recalled, of her time there, “Rose was like a wild animal. Often I would hear her screaming long before the Catholic sisters would usher us into her presence. Our visits were almost always depressing disasters. Between screams and the most vile cursing, she would be chain-smoking and pacing up and down the corridor or visiting room. Finally the Mother Superior advised us there was no future for Rose at St. Vincent’s, which was primarily equipped for ‘custodial care.’ ” By the time Rose was admitted to Farmington, four months later, at the age of twenty-seven, her anger toward her parents, and CC in particular, was beginning to grow murderous. According to the Farmington report (Case No. 9014), she stated that “both of her parents had lost their minds.” The report went on, “Frequently she appears mildly euphoric, but for the most part is bizarre, indifferent and shows no normal concern about her family, usually condemning them.” To mark her tragic departure from home, Williams wrote the poem “Valediction”:

She went with morning on her lips

down an inscrutable dark way

and we who witnessed her eclipse

have found no word to say.

I think our speechlessness is not

a thing she would approve,

she who was always light of wit

and quick to speak and move—

I think that she would say goodbye

can be no less a lyric word

than any song, than any cry

of greeting we have heard!

Edwina’s consent to a lobotomy, in 1943, was brought on by Rose’s failure to improve during her hospitalization, and especially by her persistent graphic sexual outbursts—one of which Williams witnessed in 1939. “Horrible, Horrible!” he wrote in his diary. “Her talk was so obscene—she laughed and spoke continual obscenities—Mother insisted I go in, though I dreaded it and wanted to
go out
stay outside. We talked to the Doctor afterwards—a cold, unsympathetic young man—he said her condition was hopeless that we could only expect a progressive deterioration. It was a horrible ordeal. Especially since I fear that end for myself.” Still, Williams came to believe that the lobotomy had been “tragically mistaken.” “I believe that without it Rose could have made a recovery and returned to what is called ‘normal life,’ which, despite its many assaults upon the vulnerable nature, is still preferable to an institutional existence,” he said. Moreover, Williams thought that Edwina, who later in life signed herself “Edwin” and thought a horse was living in her room, “was essentially more psychotic than my sister Rose,” he told the
Paris Review
in 1981. He went on:

Mother chose to have Rose’s lobotomy done. My father didn’t want it. In fact, he cried. It’s the only time I saw him cry. He was in a state of sorrow when he learned that the operation had been performed. . . . It didn’t embitter me against Miss Edwina. No, I just thought she was an almost criminally foolish woman. Why was the operation performed? Well, Miss Rose expressed herself with great eloquence, but she said things that shocked Mother. I remember when I went to visit her at Farmington, where the state hospital was, Rose loved to shock Mother. She had great inner resentment towards her, because Mother had imposed this monolithic Puritanism on her during adolescence. Rose said, “Mother, you know we girls at All Saints College, we used to abuse ourselves with altar candles we stole from the chapel.” And mother screamed like a peacock! She rushed to the head doctor, and she said, “Do anything,

to shut her up!” Just like Mrs. Venable, you know, except Mother wasn’t as cruel as Mrs. Venable, poor bitch.

Six months after the lobotomy, in a letter to “dearest brother,” in a script no longer well formed, Rose wrote, “You made a bad appearance the last time you called on me. You looked murderous. I’m trying not to die, making every effort possible not to do so. . . . The memory of your gentle, sleepy sick body and face are such a comfort to me.” She added, “I feel sure that you would love me if I murdered some one. You would know that I didn’t mean to. . . . If I die you will know that I miss you 24 hours a day.”

In addition to the lobotomy, in the nineteen years that she was in residence at Farmington, Rose underwent more than sixty-five electroconvulsive shock treatments. On December 31, 1956, Rose was discharged from Farmington. After a few botched attempts at residential care, Williams finally had her transferred to the deluxe Stony Lodge in Ossining, New York, high on a bluff overlooking the river. “Probably the best thing I’ve done with my life, besides a few bits of work,” Williams said of this move.

During Williams’s absences, his loyal coterie—the producer Charles Bowden and his actress wife, Paula Laurence, the actress Jane Lawrence Smith, and Maria St. Just—saw to it that Rose’s rooms were well appointed (new flower arrangements arrived every week) and that she had frequent visitors. Her bedroom had a white canopy bed and white wicker furniture. In her wallpapered sitting room, a framed photograph of the actor Tristan Rogers, who played Robert Scorpio in
General Hospital
, her favorite program, sat atop the television set. Rose’s walls were decorated with a framed poster of her famous brother, as well as with portraits of fictitious English nobles, who constituted part of the patrician family that Rose invented for herself.

Rose had her pleasures. She loved clothes. She loved churchgoing and the very loud and slow singing of hymns. She loved Christmas. Once, with some help from the Bowdens and Maureen Stapleton, Williams gave Rose a Christmas celebration in the middle of summer. “She and Tennessee sang carols and danced,” Paula Laurence recalled. Rose also liked to be driven to the Highland Diner, in Ossining, where she would order a grilled-cheese sandwich and “a non-alcoholic” Coke. “She moved among her subjects” is how Bowden described Rose’s air of noblesse oblige. “I do not desire it” was her ornate way of saying “no.” She liked to go for drives, and over the years she acquired the habit of gesturing from the limousine, a semaphore that Williams dubbed “the Windsor Wave.” He offered to take her to England to meet the Queen. “I am the Queen,” Rose replied.

In 1988, five years after his death, Rose was moved again across town to the Bethel Methodist Home, a beautiful red-brick building with pillars and an American flag at the center of its circular driveway. There she lived out the rest of her long life (she died in 1996, at age eighty-six) in her own two-room suite—the only one at the home—at the cost of about $300,000 a year.

DURING THE AUTUMN of 1957, between undergoing analysis and writing
Suddenly Last Summer
, Williams visited Rose with unusual frequency, which even the Stony Lodge administrators remarked upon. “I’ve seen Rose four times since we went out together and you’ll be happy to know that she is remarkably better,” he wrote to his mother on November 19, 1957. He went on:

We have been going each Sunday to the lovely Tappan Hill Restaurant, near Sleepy Hollow famous for Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman. Rose is taking more interest in things and more pleasure, eating much better, putting on some becoming weight again, and has even started smoking. The last few Sundays she has asked for cigarettes, but she says she doesn’t smoke except on these outings. She says that you wouldn’t approve! She still complains that her parakeet [a gift from Williams] won’t take a bath, but that’s about her only complaint, and when I took her to the drugstore yesterday, she only bought candy and a toothbrush, not the usual ten or twelve bars of soap. For her birthday my old friend Jo Healy and I are taking her into New York for some shopping. She wants a winter coat so I think I’ll give her one for a birthday present, and take her afterwards to a good restaurant and maybe let her spend the night here with Jo, at a nice hotel.