Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (88 page)

WHEN NEWS OF Williams’s death first hit the front pages, he was prayed over, wept over, recited, and lauded. At a crowded memorial at the Shubert Theatre, in a letter read by Hume Cronyn, Elia Kazan called on the theater community to stop making “sad group noises” over Williams’s death. “The man lived a very good life, full of the most profound pleasures and he lived it precisely as he chose,” Kazan said. “That is allowed to few of us.” The actress Elizabeth Ashley, who had been Williams’s definitive “Maggie the Cat,” said, “In order to negotiate life most people sort of chart an emotional course to avoid the rocks and shoals. . . . But Tennessee wrote about all of those shoals and the monsters in the sea that come up and eat the boat. He went into the taboos of the heart and let us know that we don’t have to carve out of our souls, the innocence and the madness—the things society wants to amputate. He saw life whole—not just the skin on the hand, but the bones and the blood in the veins underneath.” Arthur Miller, who, like Williams, had endured a critical fall from grace, cut to the nitty-gritty of Williams’s career and courage: “For a while the theater loved him, and then it went back to searching in its pockets for its soul. He chose a hard life that requires the skin of an alligator and the heart of a poet. To his everlasting honor, he persevered and bore all of us toward glory.”

The day after Williams’s death, the lights of twenty Broadway marquees were dimmed. At Frank E. Campbell’s funeral parlor, on the Upper East Side, Williams’s body lay in state for three days in a simple wooden coffin without handles—“the Orthodox Jewish coffin,” as Dakin Williams and St. Just called it. A Russian Orthodox priest had been imported by St. Just for the occasion, and a Russian icon was placed in Williams’s folded hands. Williams’s cousin the Reverend Sidney Lanier led the service. “It is a time of reconciliation for all who knew and shared life with him. He might laugh at our mood—we all remember his unique laugh, don’t we?” Lanier began. When a second memorial service was held at the end of the week in St. Louis, darker laughs were in store.

Williams had wanted to be buried at sea. His wish was spelled out in a notarized letter; he had spoken about it to friends and even to the camera. “I’m to be borne out to sea in an inexpensive little vessel, perhaps a shrimping boat. I suggest it put out from my island home at Key West, and when this small craft has arrived at the point most nearly determined as the point at which Hart Crane gave himself to the sea, there, at that nearest point that can be determined by any existing records, I wish to be given back to the sea, from which life is said to have come,” he said in the documentary
Tennessee Williams’ South
.

The decision to bury Williams, instead, at the Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis was made by his brother, Dakin, whose “intimate biography” was to be published that April. The previous December, Dakin had flown to Key West to show Williams the galleys and to get his blessing; Williams had sent him away without seeing him. “If he had to die, and everyone has to die, he couldn’t have done so at a more opportune moment,” said Dakin, who envisioned a literary windfall—and a huge print run—after his brother’s death. “Suddenly out of obscurity, to headlines across the nation. I think my life is beginning to take shape,” he told the
Washington
Post
. Being in Williams’s shadow, Dakin said, “has forced me to run for public office, do everything but jump off the Empire State Building.” He went on, “I didn’t have a lot of pleasant times with him. When he was well, he didn’t want to have anything to do with me. And when he was sick, he was very disagreeable to be around. I got him mostly when he was sick. I guess you could say I got in on all of the funerals and none of the picnics.”

For Dakin, who made no bones about his sibling rivalry, Williams’s funeral was a picnic of sorts. At the two-day St. Louis wake, where Williams lay in an open coffin with an Orthodox cross around his neck, Dakin sashayed around the airless funeral-home room in his “Parisian outfit,” a pea-green leather jumpsuit that zipped up the front. Copies of
Vieux Carré
and Dakin’s own
Bar Bizarre
, a privately published account of his legal career, with an introduction by his brother, were prominently displayed on a coffee table. Dakin had briefly entertained the idea of burying Williams beside his beloved grandparents in Waynesville, Ohio, but he’d judged it impractical. “The milk train doesn’t stop in Waynesville anymore,” he said. Of his decision to make St. Louis Williams’s final stop, Dakin said, “I’m sure he’d disapprove of being buried here. But I’m his only survivor and this is where I think he should rest. Where else should I put him?” He added, “This way he’ll be in a centrally located spot for people to pay their respects to the world’s greatest talent since Shakespeare.” If Dakin’s hyperbole had the ring of P. T. Barnum, it was perhaps because he had plans to turn the grave site into a tourist attraction. “Dakin planned a concession stand peddling refreshments, trinkets, souvenir key chains, and Dakin’s books,” Dotson Rader said. “Good old Dakin always trying to cash in. There’d be admission charged to visit the grave site, like Graceland.” By this time, Dakin knew that he had been mocked in his brother’s will: of an estimated five-million-dollar estate, Dakin was willed a derisory twenty-five thousand dollars but only after Rose died. He had the last laugh, however. If he couldn’t make Williams pay attention to him in life, Dakin could make him pay in death.

On March 5, more than twelve hundred mourners gathered for a ninety-minute requiem mass at the Byzantine-style St. Louis Cathedral. Afterward, a cortege of mourners, stretching for more than a mile, wound its way past 4633 Westminster Place, where the transplanted Williams family had first settled in St. Louis, in 1918, when Tom Williams was seven, to Calvary Cemetery. A tent had been set up on the greensward in front of the plot, with chairs for the mourners and a trestle for the pallbearers to rest the coffin on. With a light rain falling and the forsythia beginning to bloom, Williams was lowered into his grave. And so it came to pass that Tennessee Williams was buried in the city he called “St. Pollution”; an Episcopalian by birth and a Roman Catholic by conversion, he went to his resting place in a Jewish coffin marked by a gravestone emblazoned with an Orthodox cross. The man who had wanted to be absorbed back into the Mother Ocean ended up spending eternity next to his mother, the woman he’d fled and kept at a distance for a lifetime.

The dispute over Williams’s physical remains was over; the quarrel over his literary remains was not. Williams’s Last Will and Testament set off as sensational a display of mendacity and manipulation as any he wrote in life. In the penultimate paragraph of
Five O’Clock Angel
, St. Just wrote, “Tennessee’s two great loves had been his work and his sister Rose. In his Will, he entrusted the care of both to Maria.” How well St. Just succeeded in purveying this myth for the rest of her life can be seen in her own obituaries. “THE ARISTOCRATIC HELLCAT WHO LOVED TENNESSEE WILLIAMS” was the
London
Evening Standard
headline. The
Guardian
spelled out her story in calmer detail: “She was Williams’s closest woman friend, and her almost familial devotion was acknowledged upon his death, when she was named as his literary executor. His artistic heritage could not have been entrusted to a more vigilant administrator.”

Despite all pronouncements to the contrary, Williams did not actually name St. Just as his literary executor. His will is explicit in its intention to separate the trustees of his estate—St. Just and John Eastman, who had fiduciary power and responsibility for Rose—from the people evaluating his literary legacy: in a codicil to the will—drawn up on September 11, 1980—Williams designated Harvard University as the sole arbiter of such judgment. In revising this history, St. Just was revising her place in Williams’s story, which had been a bone of contention between them since the publication of his
Memoirs
, in 1975. As St. Just frequently told the press, she had thrown
Memoirs
into the wastebasket. She had been offended, she said, by its louche tales. She was even more offended by Williams’s having made only eleven mentions of her in the book, referring to her as “an occasional actress,” and promising the reader, “I will write more about Maria later.” The most memorable remark about her in the book is “The lady is afflicted with
folie de grandeur
.” St. Just put the screws on Williams, and his apology was a few typewritten pages about their relationship, which he promised would be published in the British edition. In the end, they were published in St. Just’s book
Five O’Clock Angel
. Williams wrote, “In the American edition of my memoirs, this richly sustaining attachment was, for some reason, reduced by the editors to the point where it seemed to be little more than an acquaintance, practically unexplained.”

But had the St. Just–Williams
amitié amoureuse
been blue-penciled out by others? “The answer is no,” Kate Medina, the original editor of the book, said. Williams himself had virtually left St. Just out of the official story of his life. She had absorbed him, but had Williams, as she claimed in
Five O’Clock Angel
, absorbed her? “I suppose in a way he had,” Gore Vidal said. “Although he was a
very
solitary cat. He appreciated, to a degree, what she did for him, which was just kind of looking after him. But I don’t think he ever had any affection for anybody.” At the finale of Williams’s 1976 play
This Is (An Entertainment)
—which was about St. Just and dedicated to her—the General offers an affectionate envoi to St. Just’s stand-in, the Countess: “My last request is a last command. Give the lady safe passage through the mountains! Will you? For old times’ sake?” In a sense, Williams had offered St. Just a safe passage through life. But in the fifteen years between the writing of that play and Williams’s death, their relationship had declined. Williams’s last, garbled story, “The Negative,” written in November 1982, tells of a has-been poet who can’t finish the poem he’s writing and is about to be sent to a nursing home. He gets a phone call from the mysterious Lady Mona, who seems to know all his difficulties and wants to be his muse. They meet in a dark café. The poet, horrified by the woman’s rapacious eyes, throws himself in the Thames.

Of St. Just, Bruce Smith—whose memoir
Costly Performances: Tennessee Williams: The Last Stage
recounted his friendship and PR work with Williams on his late plays—said, “He knew that she had exaggerated and exploited the level of their friendship beyond all recognition.” At the end of his life, Smith added, Williams was “weaning himself away from her. There were unopened letters from her even when I was around there and she was back in London. He was emotionally through with her. He said to me, ‘I don’t know why she bothers to come over here for these openings because she isn’t needed and she really isn’t wanted.’ ” Mitch Douglas recalled the rehearsals of Williams’s last Broadway play,
Clothes for a Summer Hotel
. “Maria was very much a presence,” he said. “There were lots of notes, and, if I may respectfully say so, she was getting in the way. Tennessee would smile and be very nice to her and then turn around to the people at hand and say, ‘Well, you know, she really doesn’t understand this kind of theater.’ ” According to Charles Carroll—the personal representative of the Southeast Banks of Florida, which was the sole executor of Williams’s estate until his will was probated in June 1988—Williams, before his death, considered striking St. Just’s appointment as a co-trustee from his will, but “he was a procrastinator, and he never got it done.”

Inevitably, Williams’s will was the focus of much powerful and ambivalent feeling between him and St. Just. “She was always whining about money,” Dotson Rader said. “About her future. She was getting old. He’d say, ‘Oh, baby, don’t worry. You’re in the will.’ ” Rader added, “Tennessee was always telling people they were in his will.” St. Just argued with Williams—and even fell out with him for a number of years, friends said—over her potential inheritance. This estrangement accounts for the meager twenty letters from Williams to St. Just between 1959 and 1967 that appear in
Five O’Clock Angel
. “Ultimately, money was the root of her evil,” Paula Laurence said. “She loved money. Money was all tied up with security, with love, with emotions.” With a large estate to manage, two daughters in private school, and an erratic husband, financial security was always an issue for St. Just. She wanted Williams to leave her a percentage of the royalties to one of his major plays—a gesture he’d made to other important caretakers. But the only royalties Williams left to St. Just were the proceeds of his rarely performed
Two-Character Play
—which, in fiscal terms, was as impudent a joke as Shakespeare’s leaving his wife the “second best bed.” Williams also made St. Just’s co-trusteeship of the Rose Williams Trust—and the substantial stipend that eventually came with the job—dependent on Rose’s life span. According to the will, when Rose’s life ended, so would the salaries and benefits of the co-trustees. This was a guarantee, above and beyond St. Just’s avowed devotion to Rose, that proper care would be taken of her.

When St. Just was devotedly nursing her sick husband, Peter St. Just, near the end of his life, the New York columnist Harriet Van Horne asked her, “Suppose both Peter and Tenn were terminally ill? At whose bedside would you sit?” According to Van Horne, St. Just replied, “Well, Tennessee’s, darling, of course.” As it happened, Williams died a year and a half before Peter St. Just. In the remaining years of her life, St. Just frequently asked Paula Laurence, “What do you think? If Tennessee had lived, how would this have ended?” Laurence explained, “She wanted us to reassure her that he would be with her somehow. Maybe not in a legal marriage, but together. You felt so sad about that. ‘Get real, girl!’ Jesus!”

St. Just’s frustrations and her fantasy of being Williams’s widow coalesced in her role as co-trustee of the Rose Williams Trust, which held the majority of Williams’s estate, about five million dollars. In her care of Rose, St. Just was imaginative, warm, and dutiful; in her involvement in Williams’s literary affairs, however, she was fanatical. St. Just had played a large part in getting Williams to sign the codicil to his will, withdrawing the bequest of his papers to the University of the South—the alma mater of his beloved grandfather, in whose name a literary fund was to be established—and giving them to Harvard University instead. (This legal hornet’s nest was resolved behind closed doors when the University of the South agreed to receive the assets of the trust—including the earnings of the published works—while Harvard got clear title to the manuscripts.) The producer Lyle Leverich had been in New Orleans with Williams when St. Just called him about the codicil. “ ‘Tell her I’m asleep,’ ” he recalled Williams saying to his companion. “Then he turned to me and said, ‘They want me to change my will.’ Those were exactly his words. He mumbled something about not wanting to do it. He shook his head.” But under continuing pressure, Williams did sign the codicil, and Jeanne Newlin, then the curator of the Harvard Theatre Collection, became the person in charge of the papers after his death. Daunted at the prospect of managing the estate with John Eastman—who had drawn up Williams’s will but didn’t know him well, and was busy with many other celebrity clients, including Paul McCartney (who was married to his sister), Andrew Lloyd Webber, David Bowie, and Billy Joel—Newlin pressed St. Just to get involved. “I knew that
she
was the one who knew Tennessee, and I was beginning to be worried about the material,” Newlin said, adding, “And I’ll tell you something: it was necessary. A Tennessee Williams person was necessary, who was familiar with the work.”