Since 1992, John Lahr has been senior drama critic of The New Yorker. In 1994 he wrote a New Yorker profile of Tennessee Williams’ frenemy, Lady Maria St. Just, the executor of his estate. St. Just had used her control of the estate to limit access to Williams papers, suppressing research on the playwright’s life and work. As Lahr outlines in the biography, St. Just also limited productions of Williams late work especially, after his death, since she controlled the copyright.
Lahr’s book is a reminder of how collaborative the theater is. The push and pull of Williams’ relationship with his greatest director, Elia Kazan, led me away from the idea of a Williams’ play as a static work of art. The tug of war between Kazan and Williams on the ultimate stage form of Cat on a Tin Roof, for example, is memorable. Kazan, having the best instincts of any director that Williams worked with, repeatedly pressed him for revisions.
The Kazan/Williams collaboration imploded as a result. Williams, while accepting the acclaim for Cat complained that Kazan had forced the play in a more commercial direction. Lahr comes down insistently on Kazan’s “side”. The improvements Kazan pressed Williams to make result in a stronger play. Williams taking the credit for the success but kicking the man who had helped him with it is all too human.
As long as the plays were, like A Streetcar Named Desire, representative of his strong talent, then Williams could work with the constructive criticism and evaluations from his director, his canny and literate agent, Audrey Wood, actors and friends. Williams could be shabby about accepting suggestions that made his works better, while dissing those who made the contributions. That was sometimes, but not always, his style.
As his late plays in many cases got thinner, he became more defensive. He initiated a process, it seems, of shedding friends who were more objective and independent-minded and relying more on sycophants. The incident where he fires his loyal agent of many years, Audrey Wood, typified the falling off of Williams’ loyalty towards some old associates.
Lahr’s biography makes clear the double critical vision one has to adopt towards the great plays, in contrasting the stage version with the Hollywood version. Hollywood loved Tennessee Williams and helped make his fortune. The advances he received for the filmed versions of his plays, the versions most people know, were extraordinary for their time.
But it seems Hollywood wanted the notoriety of Williams work, the tease of a more explicit treatment of sexual themes in an era when attitudes about eroticism where undergoing rapid change, without accepting the reality of Williams theater. Kazan struggled with the attempt to de-emphasize the subject of rape in the filmed version of Streetcar. Kazan had to content himself with more indirect hints. And the censorship board wanted it made clear that Stella disapproved of Stanley’s brutality, that she might be about to leave him. That’s not in the play. Williams said that people who wanted an accurate version of his work should attend to the theater versions, not the films.
In the forties and fifties, I don’t think the New York Times or any other mainstream publication would say in print that a significant national figure…or anyone else perhaps…was gay. I get the impression that the “newspaper of record” wouldn’t acknowledge the existence of gay people…ie. homosexuals. Almost everyone in Tennessee’s social circle knew he was gay. When Williams went to Hollywood accompanied by his lover, Frank Merlo, acting as his personal assistant, Jack Warner asked him what he did for Mr. Williams. The answer was: “I sleep with him.” But there was a strange pre-Stonewall schizophrenia. What everyone knew privately no one would acknowledge publicly. It’s as if there was no closet because everyone was in it.
Even as a Pulitzer prize winner, Williams and a friend were gay bashed on the street in Key West where he maintained one of his principal homes. He bravely endured the beating. And garbage was regularly thrown on his front lawn. I can’t imagine that happening nowadays with no one in the media talking about it. Lahr doesn’t make much of the incident and he doesn’t have to. Just reporting it is enough. I don’t think Williams could have done anything about it.
The Glass Menagerie is a riff on Williams’ escape from his toxic family. He got out. His sister Rose did not and was crushed. It was one of his core convictions that those who could not reach out and explore desire, who didn’t liberate themselves from family repression, remained in ignorance of themselves and of the world. Knowledge of the self and the world had to be sexual.
But something seems to have gone wrong with this model of personal liberation. Williams never stopped cruising, never called a halt to the chain of one night stands in addition to several steady relationships all of which seemed to end, eventually, in betrayal, violence or exploitation. Tennessee had ready access to drugs most of his life and he mixed them with heavy amounts of binge drinking. In middle age, his younger brother, Dakin, temporarily committed him to a hospital. Lahr points out that the treatment probably gave Williams ten more years of life. His brother was disowned.
It’s easy to read a comprehensive account of a life and nitpick, censor, judge, second-guess…read in exasperation as the subject makes poor choices, betrays loyal lovers and abandons friends in favor of inferior ones.
And then there are the plays. I read like a god, knowing what would happen, as Williams and his coterie anxiously awaited opening night reviews of The Glass Menagerie and Streetcar Named Desire. How could they not know they were making theater history? The thread of his artistic production, the long line of masterpieces and lesser but never less than interesting dramas, tying together his circle of professional associates, friends, lovers and the era in which he lived, unify the book.
Reading John Lahr’s biography of Tennessee Williams is a journey into purgatory. But purgatory has an exit…in this case exits, the works of art that Tennessee Williams created. Using those exits leads the reader back into life, in this case, Williams’ life which, in turn, leads one to fall into other states of purgatory, and so on until the end. A finely produced and expensive volume from Norton but well worth it. I decided to own a copy.
