Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (87 page)

In academic procession to receive an honorary degree from Harvard University, 1982

In January 1983, Williams sat down to write an encomium to James Laughlin, to be read at an awards dinner at the National Arts Club in New York. New Directions, which Laughlin founded and whose backlist forms a canon of modernism, had published forty-eight of Williams’s books—which have, collectively, sold five million copies, helping to sustain the independence of the house and making Williams its best-selling author. After celebrating his friend—“It was James Laughlin in the beginning and it remains James Laughlin now”—Williams invoked the work that Laughlin had published enthusiastically over the decades. “I know that it is the poetry that distinguishes the writing when it is distinguished, that of the plays and of the stories, yes, that is what I had primarily to offer,” Williams wrote. He crossed out a tentative modifying clause; by hand, he added, “And now as a time for reckoning seems near . . .”

In February, unhappy and unwell, Williams took himself off alone on a panicky junket to London, Rome, and Taormina, in Italy. Within a week, he was back in New York. At the time, a small not-for-profit theater on Forty-Second Street was reviving
Vieux Carré
; the production didn’t get reviewed. When Rader asked Williams about it, he said, “I’ve gone from good reviews, to bad reviews, to no reviews.”

On the day in 1939 when Williams first met Audrey Wood and his professional career officially began, he joined Wood and her husband in their suite at the Royalton Hotel. Wood served sherry and proposed a toast. “To us,” she said. “Let’s be honest and each of us drink to himself,” Williams replied, saluting his newly minted public identity as “Tennessee Williams.” In the more than thirty plays and seventy one-acts, written over six decades, Williams built a kingdom of the self, at once glorious and onerous. “
I, I, I!
—a burden to be surrendered,” he noted in his sixty-ninth year. In 1983, sometime between the moment when he was last seen, at 7:30 P.M. on February 24, and 10:30 A.M. the following day, when he was found in the Sunset Suite on the thirteenth floor of the Hotel Elysée in New York—the “Easy Lay,” as he called it—Williams surrendered the self that he had liberated, lacerated, pleasured, mythologized, and destroyed.

CHAPTER 10

The Sudden Subway

Tennessee called death the sudden subway and now he has taken that train.

—

JAMES LAUGHLIN,

“Tennessee”

He wrote his own life; he wanted to write his own death.

—

JOHN UECKER

There was a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door when the police arrived at Williams’s room at the Hotel Elysée at 12:40 P.M. on February 25, 1983. For three days, Williams had been holed up inside, refusing entry to the cleaners and to almost everyone, except his new agent, Luis Sanjurjo, and occasionally John Uecker, who kept an eye on him from the sitting room of the suite and his adjacent bedroom. (Williams declined at least five long-distance telephone calls from Lady St. Just.)

In his poem “Cried the Fox,” Williams had likened the panicky perpetual motion of his life to that of a fox pursued by hounds:

I run, cried the fox, in circles,

narrower, narrower still,

across the desperate hollow,

skirting the frantic hill

Now, without the energy to make another run for it, he seemed cornered. Outside his room, Uecker waited, ready to order up the breakfasts that Williams picked at, to watch television with him, or to read to him from the satchel of books he’d brought along for that purpose. “I knew he was dealing with his whole life—where he was gonna go next. He had nobody; he had no home; he didn’t have me, either—I was temporary,” Uecker said.

In
The One Exception
, a prescient one-act play—and his last piece of writing—completed in January 1983, Williams predicted his own parlous situation. His heroine, Kyra, soon to be hospitalized and “deathly afraid of institutions,” has “retreated to her room.” “She dreads any encounter,” her caretaker, May, tells Viola, a former roommate from happier times who has come to visit. “Don’t be offended. It’s the same with everyone except me, now, and even sometimes with me.” May and Viola huddle outside Kyra’s room to discuss the best way of negotiating a meeting between the old friends. “She used to have periods of depression but pulled out of them,” Viola says. “She had her work and us, her friends, to offer our moral support, in those days.”

When Kyra does finally appear, her first halting words are “I—can’t talk much. The past is—passed.” Brusque and tense, Viola pours out a cascade of gossip before trying to buttonhole Kyra for an urgent loan. Kyra, however, is in a different realm of urgency. “Yes. Alone,” she says, mishearing, “except for . . . Noth-nothing. Just—” Viola tries to touch her. Kyra trembles, calls out, apologizes, and, with the help of May, is ushered back to her room, where she locks herself in. Worried that her friend is suicidal, Viola says to May, “I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to put her in right away or there could be a repetition of the attempt to—” When May calls the doctor and pleads with Kyra to eat and to prepare herself to go to the hospital, Kyra “nods with a senseless look.” She is petrified; in the last words Williams ever wrote, his character closes down the world and herself:

Kyra takes a few hesitant steps in one direction, then another. Frightened by the sound of her slippers on the floor, she removes them: then crosses to each door and bolts it stealthily. That done, she is again undecided of what to do next: at last, she seats herself rigidly in a chair stage center and closes her eyes.

“Tennessee begged me not to call the hospital, not to put him in hospital,” Uecker said. At one point, after watching a television news report about a man who’d pulled the plug on his mother-in-law, Williams asked Uecker if he’d do that for him. “I most certainly will not,” Uecker said. “This man’s up on charges of manslaughter. I can’t do that.” Williams looked at him. “Well, the only one that I could talk to is Lady Maria. She’s strong and rich,” he said. Then he fell silent. After a while, he said, “But only if there’s little, or no, hope.”

“Every time I’d go in the room I had to get myself centered,” Uecker said. “He was watching me, worried if I was going to turn him in or not, if I was going to betray him. He didn’t want a public death.” A loyal, if nervy, companion, Uecker had Williams’s measure as an artist and a man. In the previous few months of being Williams’s “right-hand bower,” Uecker had shepherded his boss through a series of punishing abdications. “It was like watching a titan come down,” Uecker said. “You watched his vital forces leave.” He continued, “He was interested in nothing. Not in meeting or being with young people. Not once did I see him look at anyone. He was not looking at beauty at all, whether male or female beauty. He was removed from everything.”

Williams had thrown away his paints; stopped swimming; sold the Key West house. On the Monday before he died, over a half-eaten sandwich at the Drake Hotel, he told Uecker, “I can’t write. And if I can’t write. I don’t want to live. I’m gonna get some Seconals. I know you don’t approve, but you understand?” On Tuesday night, at dinner with his good friend, the actress Jane Smith, who had flown to Key West after his collapse and brought him back to recover at her New York apartment for the first two weeks of January, he confided, “I have faced the fact.”

On Thursday, Uecker, worried about Williams’s exhaustion and the Seconals he had stashed in the safe in his room, called Williams’s doctor: “I said, ‘What if he should take the whole bottle?’ He thought I was hysterical and said, ‘If there’s no liquor there, just don’t worry about it. His system is accustomed to the medication. He can’t do damage without alcohol.’ I said, ‘But he hasn’t eaten enough to sustain himself.’ He said not to worry.” Unable to calm his fears, Uecker enlisted Vass Voglis, another of Williams’s friends, to help hospitalize him. They planned to do it the next day—Friday.

On Thursday evening, Uecker awakened Williams at seven to tell him that Jane Smith was in the sitting room, eager to see him. Williams came out to see her; he was embarrassed to be in his bathrobe. “He just seemed to be in dreamland,” Uecker recalled. “He half blushed that he had slept so long. He said, ‘Oh, Jane, I just can’t go out.’ He talked to her a few minutes and went back into his room. ‘You and John go out to eat.’ ” They went downstairs to the hotel’s La Veranda Restaurant.

When Uecker returned to the suite later that evening, he put his ear to the door and heard Williams’s snoring; the next morning, he listened again and heard nothing. At 10:30 A.M., Uecker opened the door. The curtains were drawn; the place was a sour, pill-strewn mess. “It was bad. If you just took a photograph, oh my God,” Uecker said. Williams was not in his bed. “I didn’t feel his presence at all. I thought, Oh, God, he’s gonna be in the bathroom and in terrible shape. I was just totally prepared for this whole trail of blood, or something like that. I looked in the bathroom, and he wasn’t there,” Uecker recalled. “My next thought was that he got his coat on in the middle of the night and started walking around the streets. Then I saw that the hotel key was still there. When I saw the key, I knew he was on the other side of the bed. I just had to face it, you know, with my eyes.”

Williams was in his Jockey shorts, curled in a half-fetal position on the green carpet. He had slipped between the bed and the night table. He was on his right side; his glasses were still on. His right arm was extended backward, his forearm, bent at the elbow, rested against the mattress. Under the glass-covered night table was an empty vial of Seconal and a couple of corks from bottles of Corvo Salaparuta dry red wine, a half-full glass of which was on the night table. A photocopy of “Some of These Days,” a short story by Williams’s friend James Purdy, about a boy who dies of a broken heart, was also on the table. At the top of the page, as a sort of epigram, Purdy had written out some lines by Thomas Chatterton: “Water witches crowned with reeds / Bear me to your lethal tide.”

When the police arrived on the scene, they sealed off the bedroom. On the dresser they counted thirteen bottles of prescription drugs, including Aldomet, Zyloprim, Reglan, Cotazym, and HydroDiuril. Under Williams’s right hand, they found one Seconal capsule; when they turned his body over, another one was uncovered. Once the bedclothes and sheets were removed, the total came to five.

The suite, which had been a cave of solitude all week, was suddenly overrun. Police, a couple of photographers, and the city’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Elliot M. Gross, filled the room. Williams’s close friends and business associates—Luis Sanjurjo, Milton Goldman, Vass Voglis, and Jane Smith—also joined the scrum. “There were so many people it was unbelievable,” Uecker, who by his own admission started “to freak out” at the hubbub, recalled. “It all became so totally inhuman. The police came in with their Philistine ideas.
Oh, look at all these drugs—ha, ha, ha.
Their rolling eyes, giggling, smirking.
A rich decadent dies.
The whole bring-down of someone who has a great gift that people don’t understand and don’t have themselves. I just wasn’t braced for that,” he said. “I saw them making conclusions. I heard people say the press were outside.” Uecker tried to speak to Gross. “I said, ‘Look, it’s not what it looks like. I know what it looks like—that’s not what was happening. I swear to you.’ ” Gross walked away.

Williams was put in a body bag and placed on a stretcher. The ambulance crew wheeled him out of the bedroom; before they could get to the front door of the suite—reporters were crowded just outside it—Smith, who was watching with Uecker from his bedroom, said, “I’ve got to see him!” She bolted toward the stretcher, forcing her way through the phalanx of ambulance men to Williams’s body. “It was like watching some incredible opera,” Uecker said. “The whole room seemed to stop.” Smith got down on her hands and knees and held Williams in the black rubber bag. “She just cried, and cried, and cried, and kissed him,” Uecker said.

Fame, which was problematic for Williams in life, also proved a difficulty in death. On February 26, Gross announced to the press that he did not suspect foul play. “The cause of death is asphyxia due to obstruction of the glottis,” he said, “by a plastic over-cap.” According to Michael Baden, a forensic pathologist and a former chief medical examiner of New York, however, the bottle cap “was not wide enough to stop up Williams’s airway. In fact, it was not even
in
his airway. It was in his mouth.” Nonetheless, the tale of Williams choking on a long thin rubber medical-bottle stopper was the news headline, and the official public story about his death; it is included in St. Just’s
Five O’Clock Angel
and on the final page of Williams’s own edited voluminous
Notebooks
. Gross also told the press that “an autopsy was performed this morning on the body of Thomas L. Williams. . . . Further studies, including chemical tests, will be performed.” Gross had indeed sent samples to the lab for analysis, but he had sent them under another name, that of a drug-addicted youth who had jumped off a roof. Later Gross claimed that it was fear of foul play, along with the need to prevent press leaks about the famous, that had led him to do this. In 1985, Gross’s controversial practices—and his behavior at the time of Williams’s death, in particular—were featured in a
New York Times
exposé. “Gross told me it was a very important case and that he did not want anybody to know that they were working with this material,” Dr. Milton L. Bastos, the former toxicology director for the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office, told the
Times
. “This was not regular or proper. But I did it. These were orders.” About five months after Williams’s death, digging his heels in about asphyxia as the cause of death, Gross issued a statement amending his initial findings but going only so far as to admit that “apparently the overcap was being used to take the barbiturates.” Weasel words aside, it was clear from the toxicology report, which had been completed two months before Gross’s statement to the press, that whether by accident or by choice Williams had ingested a toxic level of Seconal. The report showed that Williams’s brain, blood, stomach, liver, and kidney were saturated with secobarbital.