Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) (122 page)

During part of the 1950s, Diana entered into the lowest point of her life, becoming a virtual derelict, shoplifting and stealing vegetables from a supermarket. A doctor warned her, “You’re on a dreadful merry-go-round: Alcohol, barbiturates, stimulants. If you don’t get off quickly, you will die.”

In 1957, Diana published her autobiography, as relayed to Gerold Frank. Entitled
Too Much, Too Soon
, a Cinderella story told in reverse order, it became a bestseller. Tennessee read it avidly, believing that he understood this troubled actress, who had been born to a heritage of beauty, breeding, and wealth, but who had stumbled tragically through a blighted life.

He was touched by her uninhibited published account of her notorious life. After having suffered through the depths of degradation, she finally summoned the courage to pull herself up and valiantly start again, trying her chance on the stage. She played Maggie the Cat in 1958 in a road show version of
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, and received respectable reviews.

In Philadelphia, she appeared in another of Tennessee’s plays, this time interpreting the key role of Blanche DuBois in
A Streetcar Named Desire
. By this time, Diana had met the poet, Gilbert Maxwell, who had become besotted with her. She urged him to prevail upon Tennessee to drive to Philadelphia to watch her perform as Blanche.

Two weeks before the Philadelphia premiere, she’d suffered a tragic accident. One night, she’d taken two sleeping pills, but awoke at midnight. Famished, she went to the kitchen and, in her drowsy condition, put an entire stick of butter into an iron skillet in which she planned to scramble some eggs.

Before she could scramble the eggs, she fainted, falling against the skillet. As she collapsed onto the floor, the hot butter in the skillet scalded her right thigh, seriously damaging it. She managed to call for an ambulance and was rushed to the hospital.

The first doctor who examined her gave her some alarming news: “Miss Barrymore, your leg might have to be amputated.” Somehow, her fighting spirit was aroused, and she summoned other specialists, who were able to save her leg. When she returned to rehearsals in anticipation of her Philadelphia premiere, she was still in severe pain, with an obviously bandaged leg.

Gilbert and Tennessee arrived in Philadelphia to watch Diana perform as Blanche during the late spring of 1959.

Tennessee sensed the physical pain she endured during her appearance as Blanche. “I suspected she was on the bottle again,” he told Gilbert. “At one point, when she sat down, she looked as if she had throbbing hemorrhoids. But through it all, she displayed a certain gallantry, and the powerful Barrymore madness got her through her last three scenes brilliantly.”

Maxwell, still enamored with her at the time, was the first to reach her backstage. “In the harsh glare of a backstage exposed light, I saw that the bones of her neck and spine, revealed in a low-cut black dress, were much too evident. She was a sort of urchin-girl-woman, too thin, too high strung, supersensitive, and somehow touching.”

When Tennessee encountered Diana backstage, he said, “Her dress was soaked with perspiration, as if she had been standing under a shower. When I embraced her, I was frightened because her breast was heaving with such a dangerous intensity. I whispered to her manager, ‘Don’t you think we’d better call a doctor?’”

Another close friend of Tennessee’s, Paul Bigelow, noticed that “Diana Barrymore soon joined Tenn’s coven of lost ladies, who included Maria St. Just and Marion Vaccaro. Diana saw in him a savior for both herself and her career. Like the other ladies, she imposed on him. She was invited to do so because he saw her as a defeated soul in every way, much like himself, and so, he took her on as a project. This, of course, turned out very badly, very savagely, with a good deal of mutual abuse.”

The director of the Philadelphia production of
Streetcar
, George Keathley
[founding director of the Studio M Playhouse, a theater in Coral Gables, Florida]
, observed both Tennessee and Diana during that summer of 1959. “Both of them were drinking heavily and taking far too many drugs,” he asserted. “Diana also procured young men for Tennessee, the way the Elizabeth Taylor character did for the fictional Sebastian in
Suddenly Last Summer
. She also helped him dress in drag for private parties, something I’d never heard that he’d done before. In spite of all this, she believed that Tennessee might not permanently be a homosexual. She became passionately dedicated to turning him straight.”

Diana soon became a fixture in his life. They were seen everywhere together, from New York to Key West, from Havana to Rome. Newspaper columnists, feigning to appear more innocent than they really were, predicted that wedding bells would soon be ringing.

Even Audrey Wood, who should have known better, told Tennessee, “I don’t think it will be long before I’m a flower girl at your wedding.”

From Rome, Diana wrote to Dakin Williams: “Our trip to Italy has been idyllic, although Tennessee also took along Marion Vaccaro. I have never been so happy. Just to sit at your brother’s feet and to light his cigarettes is pure joy.”

Back in New York, Diana bought a new blue mink coat, and wore it as Tennessee accompanied her to the theater and to dinner at Sardi’s. Once, he took her to a performance of his one-act play,
I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix
, starring Alfred Ryder in Tennessee’s overview of one of his idols, D.H. Lawrence. Viveca Lindfors played Lawrence’s wife, Frieda.

[Many critics claim that D.H. Lawrence was Tennessee’s major literary inspiration, although Tennessee himself claimed that it was Anton Chekhov first, then Lawrence. Donald Windham and Tennessee had based their joint play
, You Touched Me!,
on a short story by Lawrence. Frieda, his widow, had granted the rights
.

In addition to that, Tennessee wanted to write his own play about D.H. and Frieda—hence, the
Phoenix
drama. He wrote, “Lawrence felt the mystery and power of sex as the primal life urge, and was the life-long adversary of those who wanted to keep the subject locked away in the cellars of prudery. Much of his work is chaotic and distorted by tangent obsessions, such as his insistence upon woman’s subservience to the male, but all in all, his work is probably the greatest modern monument to the dark roots of creation.”]

Diana took Tennessee to see the film adaptation (
Too Much, Too Soon
; 1958) of her infamous autobiography. Dorothy Malone starred in it as Diana, and a debauched-looking Errol Flynn played John Barrymore, who had been one of Flynn’s best friends and drinking partners.

Tennessee and Diana shared many intimate secrets together. One night, when she made it clear that she wanted him to be her fourth husband, he asked her about the first three. She’d been married to the actor and tennis player Bramwell Fletcher (from 1942-1946); John Howard (for a brief period in 1947); and finally another actor, Robert Wilcox (from 1950-1955). “Of them all, Wilcox was the love of my life, although he once nearly beat me to death during one of his violent assaults on me.”

She seemed to hold no grudge against Wilcox: “Noël Coward told me that a woman should be struck regularly, like a gong. He’s right. Women are no damn good.” She went on to tell Tennessee that the only writers she ever read were Ellery Queen and Tennessee himself.

Most of these revelations took place in her Manhattan apartment, its walls covered with framed photographs of John Barrymore. She always made herself up to look especially lovely for Tennessee. He remembered one night when she came to the door wearing a scarlet silk blouse, tapered black slacks, and ballet slippers that she claimed were once owned by Pavlova.

“I felt she was a woman trying to save her own life from the depths she’d known,” he said. “She seemed to be desperately reaching out for that affection that had been denied to her by her parents. She seemed so eager to please me that she was almost living in a perpetual state of panic.”

Diana projected a glorious future for herself
[as an actress]
, and for Tennessee
[as a playwright]
on Broadway. “You’ll write great roles for a woman, and I’ll star in them. You and I will become the hottest ticket on Broadway.”

Their “romance” often encountered hurdles, many of them from Frank Merlo, who was already sifting through the embers of the fire that had once burned so passionately between Tennessee and himself. One night, Tennessee invited Diana, Anna Magnani, and Marion Vaccaro to his Manhattan apartment for drinks and a light supper.

Early in the evening, Audrey Wood telephoned and said that she needed the final draft of
Period of Adjustment
, Tennessee’s most recent play at the time, before her meeting with backers the following morning. Frank was dispatched to deliver the script to her home.

When Frank returned, he found Magnani chatting in the living room with Vaccaro. He barged into the bedroom to find Tennessee in a huddle with Diana. He dragged her out of the bedroom and pushed her across the living room and out the door. He was normally friendly with Magnani, but that night he viewed her as “one of the co-conspirators,” so a few minutes later, after screaming denunciations, he tossed the Italian diva out of the apartment, as well as Vaccaro.

All of their respective relationships survived that violent night, but bigger problems for Tennessee and Diana loomed on the horizon.

Shortly after Tennessee let Diana Barrymore read the first draft of his
Sweet Bird of Youth [which eventually opened on Broadway in 1959]
, she rushed to see him at once. “You have written the perfect role for me, the part that will put me over the top. I’m destined to play the Princess Kosmonopolis or, as you also call her, Alexandra del Lago.
I AM THAT PERSON
. I understand her to my toenails.”

He was hesitant, as he was engaged in private negotiations with Geraldine Page, discussing the possibility of her in the role opposite Paul Newman, whose interest in appearing in the play had already been expressed.