Tennessee Williams

• 1. Introduction

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  Tennessee Williams wrote in his will that he wanted to be sewn into a canvas sack and dropped into the sea at the exact spot where his idol, the poet Hart Crane, had died. His brother ignored that wish entirely and buried him in St. Louis. That gap between what Williams wanted and what the world gave him runs through almost everything he left behind.

  Thomas Lanier Williams III was born on the 26th of March, 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi. He would grow up to be one of the three playwrights considered the foremost voices of 20th-century American drama, alongside Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller. His play A Streetcar Named Desire is routinely placed on short lists of the greatest American plays ever written, beside O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and Miller's Death of a Salesman.

  But the trajectory from that Mississippi birth to Broadway immortality was anything but smooth. What drove Williams to the typewriter in the first place? What in his own family did he turn into art? And how did a man who earned two Pulitzer Prizes end up spending his final decades in and out of treatment facilities? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Family He Could Not Escape

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  Cornelius Coffin Williams, known as C.C., was a traveling shoe salesman who became an alcoholic and was frequently absent from his children's lives. His wife Edwina was the daughter of an Episcopal priest, the Reverend Walter Dakin, who was assigned to a parish in Clarksdale, Mississippi, shortly after Williams was born. For much of his early childhood, Williams lived with his family in his grandfather's rectory.

  As a young child, Williams nearly died from diphtheria. The illness left him frail and confined to the house for a year of recuperation. His father, a descendant of East Tennessee pioneers with a violent temper, regarded what he saw as the boy's effeminacy with disdain. Edwina, locked in what critics and historians describe as an unhappy marriage, focused almost all of her attention on her frail young son.

  Williams's older sister Rose Isabel, born in 1909, would become the defining relationship of his life. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a young woman. In 1943, when her behavior had grown severely disturbing, their mother authorized a lobotomy that required Rose to be institutionalized for the rest of her life. Williams moved Rose to a private institution just north of New York City as soon as he could afford to do so. He gave her a percentage interest in several of his most successful plays, with the royalties applied toward her care.

  Critics and historians agree that Williams drew on this dysfunctional family in his writing. Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie is thought to be modeled on Rose. Some biographers believed that Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire is also based on her. Amanda Wingfield in the same play generally was taken to represent his mother Edwina. The lobotomy itself appears as a motif in Suddenly, Last Summer. Even the family's repeated moves around St. Louis, driven by his father's drinking and his mother's search for a better home, found their way into the stage directions of The Glass Menagerie, which names Soldan High School, one of the schools Williams actually attended, as a setting.

• 3. The Shoe Factory and the Typewriter

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  At age 16, Williams won third prize for an essay published in Smart Set, titled "Can a Good Wife Be a Good Sport?" A year later, his short story "The Vengeance of Nitocris" appeared in the August 1928 issue of the magazine Weird Tales, credited to "Thomas Lanier Williams". Neither publication brought him any significant recognition.

  At the University of Missouri in Columbia, where he enrolled in 1929, Williams was bored by his journalism classes and entered his poetry, essays, stories, and plays in writing contests. His first submitted play, Beauty Is the Word, a piece about rebellion against religious upbringing, earned him an honorable mention in a writing competition, making him the first freshman to receive that distinction. After he failed a military training course in his junior year, his father pulled him out of school and set him to work at the International Shoe Company factory in St. Louis.

  Williams hated the monotony. He set a goal of writing one story every week and worked on weekends and late into the night. His mother later recalled finding him sprawled across his bed fully dressed, too tired to remove his clothes. By his 24th birthday, overworked and without further writing success, he suffered a nervous breakdown and left the job. The character of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire was partly drawn from memories of a particular co-worker from those factory years.

  He enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis in 1936, then transferred to the University of Iowa in Iowa City in the autumn of 1937. He was graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English in August 1938. Around 1939, reflecting his Southern accent and roots, he adopted the pen name Tennessee Williams. Speaking of an early collaborative play called Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay!, he wrote: "The laughter... enchanted me. Then and there the theatre and I found each other for better and for worse. I know it's the only thing that saved my life."

• 4. Rise and Recognition

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  In 1939, with the help of his agent Audrey Wood, Williams received a $1,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in recognition of his play Battle of Angels. It was produced in Boston in 1940 and was poorly received. He used some of those Rockefeller funds to move to New Orleans, where he wrote for the Works Progress Administration. He lived for a time at 722 Toulouse Street in the French Quarter, a building that would later become part of The Historic New Orleans Collection and would serve as the setting of his 1977 play Vieux Carré.

  The Rockefeller grant brought Williams to the attention of the Hollywood film industry. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer gave him a six-month writing contract at $250 weekly. That Hollywood chapter produced little that lasted. What did last came from Chicago during the winter of 1944-45, when his memory play The Glass Menagerie, developed from his 1943 short story "Portrait of a Girl in Glass", received its first production and garnered strong reviews. It moved to New York, became an immediate hit, and won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best play of the season.

  Director Elia Kazan, who would go on to helm many of Williams's greatest successes, later said of the playwright: "Everything in his life is in his plays, and everything in his plays is in his life." Two years after The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire opened in 1947, and its enormous success fixed Williams's standing as a major playwright. Between 1948 and 1959, he had seven plays produced on Broadway. By 1959, he had earned two Pulitzer Prizes, three New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards, three Donaldson Awards, and a Tony Award.

  The second Pulitzer, for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955, came with an unusual backstory. Although The Flowering Peach by Clifford Odets was the Pulitzer jury's preferred choice, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was initially considered the weakest of the five shortlisted nominees, Joseph Pulitzer Jr., chairman of the Board, had personally seen the play and judged it worthy. The Board sided with him after considerable discussion.

• 5. Frank Merlo and the Years of Happiness

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  Williams met Frank Merlo in New York City when he returned from spending the spring and summer of 1948 in Rome. Merlo was an occasional actor of Sicilian ancestry who had served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. The relationship would last 14 years, making it the enduring romantic relationship of Williams's life.

  Merlo became Williams's personal secretary and took on most of the details of their domestic life. Williams feared, as he did throughout his adult life, that he would follow his sister Rose into insanity. Merlo provided what Williams needed most: stability and a reliable counterweight to his frequent bouts with depression. Their years together, spent between an apartment in Manhattan and a modest house in Key West, Florida, were what Williams later described as his happiest and most productive.

  Infidelities and drug abuse on both sides ended the relationship. Shortly after their breakup, Merlo was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. Williams returned to him and cared for him until Merlo died on the 20th of September, 1963. In the years immediately following, Williams descended into what he described as a period of nearly catatonic depression. He submitted to injections by Dr. Max Jacobson, known popularly as Dr. Feelgood, who used increasing amounts of amphetamines to treat his depression, then combined them with prescriptions for the sedative Seconal to address his insomnia.

  The devastating effects of his sister Rose's lobotomy had already contributed to Williams's alcoholism and his dependence on amphetamines and barbiturates, a connection he made openly. After Merlo's death, Williams was never truly able to recover his earlier creative standing, or to free himself from his dependence on prescription drugs.

• 6. The Long Decline

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  By the 1960s and 1970s, Williams still wrote every day. The discipline never left him. But the quality of his work suffered from his escalating alcohol and drug consumption, and from what the source describes as occasional poor choices of collaborators. Consumed by depression and cycling in and out of treatment facilities, he produced a string of plays that were box office failures: Kingdom of Earth, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, Small Craft Warnings, The Two Character Play, The Red Devil Battery Sign, Vieux Carré, Clothes for a Summer Hotel, and others. Negative press notices wore down his spirit.

  In the 1970s, when Williams was in his 60s, he had a lengthy relationship with Robert Carroll, a Vietnam War veteran and aspiring writer in his 20s. Williams had deep affection for Carroll and genuine respect for what he saw as the younger man's talents, but friends including Maria Britneva saw the relationship as destructive because both men had drug problems. Williams himself wrote that Carroll played on his "acute loneliness" as an aging gay man. When they broke up in 1979, Williams called Carroll a "twerp", but they remained friends until Williams died. Along with Rose, Carroll was one of the two people who received a bequest in Williams's will.

  His last play, A House Not Meant to Stand, was produced in Chicago in 1982. Despite largely positive reviews, it ran for only 40 performances. He had also been working on another final play, In Masks Outrageous and Austere, described as an attempt to reconcile certain forces and facts of his own life. That theme of reconciling his life through art was, the source notes, a continuing preoccupation throughout his work. At the time of his death, the play remained unfinished. Author Gore Vidal later completed it, and it received its world premiere in New York City in April 2012, directed by David Schweizer and starring Shirley Knight.

• 7. Death and Aftermath

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  Williams was found dead on the 25th of February, 1983, at age 71, in his suite at the Hotel Elysee in New York City. The Chief Medical Examiner of New York City, Elliot M. Gross, initially reported that Williams had choked to death on the plastic cap from a bottle of nasal spray or eye solution. That report was corrected on the 14th of August, 1983, to state that Williams had been using the cap to ingest barbiturates and had died from a toxic level of secobarbital.

  His will, written in 1972, expressed a wish to be buried at sea as close as possible to the spot in the Caribbean where the poet Hart Crane had died. He wanted to be sewn into a canvas sack and dropped overboard in an explicit tribute to Crane, one of the writers he had most admired. His brother Dakin instead arranged for him to be buried at Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri, where his mother is interred.

  According to reporting in The New York Times, most of his estate was left to the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, with the bulk to remain in trust for his sister Rose during her lifetime. Rose died in 1996 after many years in a mental institution in New York state. The university subsequently received approximately $7 million, which supports a creative writing program.

  Four years before his death, Williams had been inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. In 1979, he was already regarded as a monument of American letters, yet the man who wrote about displacement, frailty, and the impossibility of return had, in the end, no control over where he came to rest. The U.S. Postal Service honored him with a stamp on the 13th of October, 1995, as part of its literary arts series, and since 1986, the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival has been held annually in New Orleans at the end of March to coincide with his birthday.