Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (74 page)

In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel
lasted for twenty-five performances. In May, Williams was awarded the Gold Medal for Drama by the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in June, a full-page ad for
Life
magazine appeared in the
New York
Times.
In it, a picture of Williams’s mustached profile was captioned, “Played out? ‘Tennessee Williams has suffered an infantile regression from which there seems no exit. . . . Almost free of incident or drama . . . nothing about
In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel
deserves its production.’ That’s the kind of play it is, and that’s the kind of play it gets in this week’s
Life
.” “I really began to crack,” Williams said.

In desperation, Williams, accompanied by Anne Meacham and his bulldog, Gigi, fled to Japan, ostensibly to see rehearsals of
Streetcar
at the renowned Bungakuza Theatre Company in Tokyo, but quarantine issues with the dog sent him into an even deeper tailspin. “I had an evening with very sad Tennessee Williams and Anne Meacham,” Yukio Mishima wrote to Robert MacGregor. “I did not understand his talking at all because he was drunken being so shocked by Japanese custom officers’ bureaucratic treatment to separate him and his sweetheart Gigi (a dog). It was a very very sad but very impressive evening. I took care of him with Anne beside of his bed in order to give him a good sleep and sweet dream. He was just a big baby with beards drinking alcohol instead of milk.” “My condition had so deteriorated that I do not even recall my seeing Yukie,” Williams confided later to Oliver Evans. After the fiasco of Japan, where Williams proved impossible for Meacham to wrangle—he ended up accusing her of stealing his drugs—he reunited with Bill Glavin in San Francisco, for a dismal three-week stay at the elegant Fairmont Hotel.

With Bill Glavin

Glavin was a charming New Jersey–born lost soul, with azure eyes, half-moon teeth, rotted away, and nice cheekbones, who had a “rollicking nature” and “an almost suspect glamor,” according to Williams. He was tall, cast against type for Williams. “Tennessee always preferred someone of his own height as a companion,” Bill Gray, a professor of English who befriended Williams in the late forties, said. “He did not like a person of ideas. He did not like an intellectual. God knows Glavin filled
that
bill.” Many people who saw Williams and Glavin at close quarters felt that Glavin treated Williams shabbily. “He didn’t look after him. He didn’t do the job. Glavin was never there,” the realtor Robert Hines said. According to Jack Fricks, Hines’s partner, Glavin “would get Tennessee knocked out and have him back home by ten or eleven in the evening, and then Glavin would take off and go out and stay out till four in the morning.” Even a laissez-faire freeloader like Glavin had his work cut out trying to take care of Williams. “There’s a limit to what anybody could do with Tennessee in that period,” Dakin Williams said. “Glavin couldn’t handle Tennessee because of his temperament—an explosive type Irish temperament.”

Nonetheless, for five years until 1970, Glavin ushered Williams through his Stoned Age, that twilight zone in which Williams “elected to be a zombie except for my mornings at work . . . [and] didn’t know if I wanted to live or not.” Glavin accompanied Williams on his daily Manhattan walkabout—to his analyst’s office, to see Dr. Feelgood, to swim at the Y, to lunch at L’Escargot, to the previews of
Gnadiges Fraulein
at the Longacre, where they sat in a box and laughed uproariously, and where the producer, Charles Bowden, caught them in the men’s room “shooting up with Dr. Feelgood’s amphetamines.” Glavin was bisexual and “very attractive to ladies,” according to Williams. He also had a ruthlessness that made him “perhaps . . . closest to representing Chance Wayne in ‘Sweet Bird of Youth’ in my life.” But Williams’s attachment was more to Glavin’s managerial skills than his erotic expertise. “During our nearly five years together he offered himself to me only three or four times, and, as best as I can remember, I had no carnal knowledge of anyone but him during his time with me.”

“Tennessee made impossible demands on Glavin,” Dakin Williams recalled. “They would go to Europe, and Tennessee would have forgotten his syringes that he’d gotten from Dr. Feelgood. He would accuse Glavin of having stolen them. He would make Glavin pack up and go back to New York with him. Tennessee would find them in his room.” In Williams’s fragile, drugged, paranoid state, Glavin frequently became the object of his boss’s furious projections. Once at lunch at L’Escargot, they got into a shouting match over Williams’s accusations of disloyalty and theft. Glavin walked out, which is when Williams penned his paranoid SOS about being murdered.

In the early days of their relationship, when they were living in separate bedrooms in the thirty-third-floor penthouse at 15 West Seventy-Second adjacent to The Dakota, a pill-popping guest took Williams aside and said, “Tennessee, how do you dare live on the thirty-third floor of a building with a man with eyes like that and with a balcony he could throw you off of.” The next day—“being a madman”—Williams had his furniture put into storage and moved alone into a nearby hotel for a few days, until Glavin discovered his whereabouts and joined him. “[Glavin] probably started, then, to hate me,” Williams wrote in
Memoirs
. Toward the end of their relationship, Williams gave Glavin a copy of August Strindberg’s
Dance of Death
, one of his “three favorite modern plays.” In an appended note, he wrote, “It isn’t so much my life that I value but what I live for—my work. In destroying
me
, you are destroying
that
, and are you
sure
you’re
worth
it? Think hard! And fast! So will I!”

When Glavin rejoined Williams in San Francisco after the Japan debacle, Williams’s paranoid scenes grew so bad that they were turned out of the Fairmont. Williams moved on to New York to oversee the duplication of his scripts and to score a hundred tablets of Doriden, and then to New Orleans for a rendezvous with Pancho Rodriguez. Williams was in free fall, a king dethroned by his critics and divested by his own caprice of imaginative command, sent to wander alone in the wilderness. The gauge of Williams’s melancholy was his rage at the loss. In the poem “Old Men Go Mad at Night” (1973), he looked back at this ugly period of paranoid turmoil and gave brilliant poetic shape to his sense of depleted inspiration:

Old men go mad at night

but are not Lears

There is no kingly howling of their rage,

their grief, their fears, dementedly,

from sea-cliff into storm. [. . .]

No title of dignity, now,

no height of old estate

Gives stature to the drama . . .

Ungrateful heirs, indeed!

Their treacherous seed

Turns them away from more than tall

gold-hammered doors:

Exiles them into such enormous night

skies have no room for it

And old men have no Fools except themselves.

On September 7, 1969, not having spent more than a month in one place for more than a year, Williams straggled back to Key West, with Glavin, whom he promptly sent away for a week. Confused and alone, without even the feckless Glavin on hand for company, Williams sank like a stone. “He never knew where he was most of the time,” his friend the novelist David Loomis recalled. “He staggered. His hands shook. He was incoherent. He’d get paranoiac and scream and shout and cry.” Williams was living under a demented state of siege. He placed a frantic call to his Key West friend Margaret Foresman. “He insisted someone was going to break in the house and kill him,” Foresman said, adding, “He’d call me to come over and check around the house—he was convinced there were prowlers and murderers. He wouldn’t call the police himself, he had me do it—he was used to having people do things like this—and when the deputy sheriff arrived, Williams insisted that someone guard the house all night. All that week he became worse and worse.”

Foresman contacted Wood, who had also been called by Vaccaro; she in turn called Dakin. Having experienced Williams’s capricious rage-outs when he was in this kind of paranoid condition, Vaccaro was chary to intervene. The following week, Williams picked up a Silex containing boiling coffee from a stove that had been set up on the patio while his new kitchen was being installed, then slipped on tiles and scalded his naked shoulder. “The rest is not a blur but is too fragmented and chaotic to be sorted out so far,” he wrote later. The burn was not bad but was sufficient proof to Williams that someone was trying to kill him. “Dakin, an attempt will be made on my life tonight,” he told his brother in a distressed call at ten o’clock that night. “Well, Tom, I can’t do anything about it tonight,” Dakin recalled replying. “Is it all right if I come tomorrow morning?”

The burn may have been superficial, but Williams’s collapse was profound. Dakin saw his opportunity. Using the burn as an excuse, he asked Williams to come to St. Louis, to Barnes Hospital, where a cousin, Dr. Carl Harford, was in residence, a guarantee of proper attention. On the plane, when the flight attendant refused to give Williams more than the two-drink limit in first class, he made a scene. Dakin was forced to leave the plane during a stopover in Chattanooga, to hunt for booze. It was a Sunday; he came back empty-handed. Williams threw a fit. When they arrived in St. Louis, Dakin rushed Williams to their mother’s house, where there was liquor, and Williams was finally pacified.

Photograph by Richard Avedon, 1969

The plan was for Williams to go to Barnes Hospital by ambulance the next morning, but when the time came, Williams balked. Around noon, with Dakin’s intervention and accompanied by Edwina, Williams admitted himself as “Thomas L. Williams” and underwent tests while ensconced in “Queeny Towers”—the deluxe top-floor wing of Barnes. His room, not far from the swimming pool, had blue satin curtains and a large television on which he watched Shirley Booth in
Hazel
. (“I thought Shirley was making veiled innuendoes about me,” Williams said.) He was allowed to keep his blue kit bag full of pills, speed, and syringes by his bedside table. Propped up on pillows, with a little stocking cap on his head, as Dakin recalled, Williams “thought he was in full control of everything.”

That evening, Dakin arrived with a bouquet of flowers and get-well notes to Williams from his nieces; his mother also reappeared, looking like “a little Prussian officer in drag,” Williams recalled in
Memoirs
:

There was now, quite clearly, something impending of a fearful nature. I sensed this and scrambled with remarkable agility out of bed and said, “I’m going home right now,” and I ran into the closet to get into my clothes.

“Oh no, Son.”

“You all will drive me right home or I’ll walk.”

I got myself dressed with amazing alacrity, all the while shouting abuse at Dakin.

“God damn you and your two adopted children. How dare you give them our family name.”

Dakin: “I don’t have to sit here and listen to this abuse.”

Now fully dressed and totally out of my mind, I charged into the corridor and down to the elevators. I started to enter one, was blocked in this escape effort by a huge young man in hospital uniform. He was blond, I remember, with a beefy, sneering face. I somehow slipped past him into the elevator but he wouldn’t let the doors close.

Raging and storming invectives, I rushed back past him to the room where Mother was asking a nurse for smelling salts. Jesus!

Then I lit into her with a vengeance.

“Why do women bring children into the world and then destroy them?”

(I still consider this a rather good question.)

Said Miss Edwina—sincerely?—“I just don’t know if we’re doing the right thing.”

The “thing” to which she was referring was committing Williams to the hospital’s psychiatric ward, the Renard Division. Alarmed by Williams’s state, Dakin had asked his cousin at the hospital for advice on how to handle the emergency. “He told me that I could sign a letter at the hospital admitting him for ten days. After that Tennessee could get out any time he wanted to,” Dakin said. He went on, “Of course, I never told Tennessee that. He had no legal advice. If he’d had legal advice, he could’ve gotten out in ten days which, of course, would have killed him. Ten days would have done him no good at all.”