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) (57 page)

“Welcome to the club,” Tennessee said. “Everyone writes that about my plays.”

Marlon told his guests that variations on the Horatio Alger story were the wrong reading material for America’s youth. “Fame is a fraud and a gyp,” Brando said. “The biggest disappointment of my life.”

At the door, Tennessee and Frank kissed Brando on the lips. They did not know when they would see him again.

Tears welled in Tennessee’s eyes when he told Brando that “on some glorious morning I’m going to create another Stanley Kowalski character for you to play.”

“I’ll be there for you,” he answered.

Before heading down the hall, Tennessee looked back at Brando. “I’ll race you to hell. Bet I’ll get there before you do.”

Brando would later claim that “he encountered Tenn deep into drugs and pills—but not quite as bad as Monty Clift. Tenn was clearly coming apart. Success is a deadly game, especially when you can’t live up to your earlier successes. Just ask me.”

[When his stage and screen performances had thrust him into the public arena in the 1950s, Brando had been part of an exclusive ten-member club whose films earned more than any other actors’ in the entertainment industry. But by the 1960s, times had changed. The American public was growing tired of Brando’s “poetic hooliganism.” Despite Brando’s brief comeback with the release of
The Godfather
in 1972, the kids who had flocked to see
The Wild One
in the 1950s had grown up and sired rebellious children of their own. Now, they could scoff at the idol of their teenage years
.

To his new best friend of the 1990s, Michael Jackson (of all people), Brando confided, “My good-bye has been the longest good-bye in the history of show business. My tragedy was I didn’t know enough to get off the stage when the play had ended.”]

In his play,
Suddenly Last Summer
, Tennessee’s character of Sebastian was “famished for blondes,” when he abandoned the Mediterranean and headed north to Scandinavia. In the summer of 1961, Tennessee left Frank behind in Key West as he sailed to the Greek island of Rhodes. There, he wrote to one of his best friends, Maria St. Just.

“I do not plan to return to Frankie. The Horse has done just about all in his power to shatter me and humiliate me, so I must find the courage to forget and put away a sick thing. But to be fair, it isn’t easy to live thirteen years with a character walking a tight rope and a thin one over lunacy. But the time has come to ‘cool it.’”

When Frank went to visit his family in New Jersey, Tennessee flew to Key West with a handsome young artist he’d met in New York. When it came time to write his memoirs, he could not remember the painter’s name.

As the artist and Tennessee were making love on the living room sofa in Key West, Frank’s friend, Danny Stirrup, emerged from the patio and saw them. Before midnight, he’d telephoned Frank in the north, where he was in the hospital for two days of extensive medical tests.

After leaving the hospital, Frank flew to Florida where he encountered both the painter and Tennessee. For the first hour, he didn’t speak. Then he exploded. “Like a junglecat, Frankie sprang across the room and seized the painter by the throat,” Tennessee wrote in his memoirs. He was forced to call the police to prevent strangulation.

The police delivered Frank to Stirrup’s home for the night, and Tennessee, along with the painter, drove to Miami and checked into a motel.

Later, Tennessee confessed that the young man “wanted too much sex.” So he paid the artist for a painting he’d left behind in Key West, the price of which was more than enough for him to buy a plane ticket back to his native San Francisco.

After that, Tennessee flew alone back to his new apartment at 134 East 65
^th
Street in Manhattan. Within two months, he had launched an affair with a handsome young Frederick Nicklaus, an aspiring poet who had graduated from the University of Ohio.

Frederick was a cousin of the famous golfer, Jack Nicklaus. The poet would subsequently publish two volumes of poetry—
The Man Who Bit the Sun
(1964) and
Cut of Noon
(1971).

In 1962, while Tennessee was fretting over rewrites for
The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore
, he decided to take Frederick to Tangier. Once there, they rented a 200-year-old house that had once been the harem of a sultan.

Almost from the beginning, Tennessee began to suffer through conflicts with the poet. He told Paul Bowles, “He’s a decent companion but he can’t do anything practical. Frank used to handle all these things for me. Freddie does-n’t even know how to make a phone call. When we travel, it is nothing but chaos. Reservations are fucked up, Airplane flights are missed. He can’t even put a key in the door and open it. As you know, the flushing of a toilet in Tang-ier is different from what it is in America. He can’t even master the new way of flushing.”

Leaving Morocco, Tennessee returned with Frederick to New York. He made arrangements to rent a small house on Nantucket, to which he also invited Sal Mineo and Rock Hudson, who had met and bonded with one another (and with Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean) in 1956 during the making of the movie
Giant
.

“Rock and Sal could give other men a case of penis envy,” Tennessee later told Donald Windham. “They walked around our upper floor stark raving naked, with everything hanging out. We had to share a bathroom. Once, I caught them in a wild sixty-nine on our living room sofa. Both of these actors would have done great in porno. My only regret is that they did not invite me to join them.”

After Nantucket, Frederick and Tennessee flew to Key West, where they found Frank in residence.

For a while in January of 1963, Tennessee, Frank, and Frederick tried to live together in the same house. But it was hardly a convivial
ménage à trois
. Frank spent most days and nights alone and isolated in his bedroom. A black woman cook carried trays of food to him.

Jack Dunphy, the lover of Truman Capote, came to visit. He was very sympathetic to Frank.

Frank told Dunphy, “On seven different occasions, I’ve saved Tenn from suicide. But he’s not grateful. Without me, there would be no Tennessee Williams.”

I, too, lived in Truman’s shadow,” Dunphy said. “Unlike Frank, I’m also a writer, and I had to endure my work being compared unfavorably to his writing. I could see that Frank’s spirit had been broken. I think that’s what gave him cancer. He had been replaced by Frederick. Tennessee robbed Frank of his identity. He felt he had no recourse but to die.”

Director John Huston arrived in Key West to discuss plans for the upcoming filming of
The Night of the Iguana
(1964) in Mexico. Tennessee decided to charter a boat to take him fishing. Part of the itinerary included some beach time on an uninhabited island that had been occupied during World War II by a naval lookout station.

As the vessel moored, Frederick jumped off the side of the chartered boat for a nude swim. Perhaps he spotted a shark or something. In panic, he screamed. He began flailing his arms and appeared close to drowning. He never explained exactly what happened, but it appeared to the crew that he could not swim at all. Responding with alarm, the captain’s mate jumped in to save him, hauling his near lifeless body back on board.

In front of Huston, the captain and the crew, Tennessee gave Frederick “the kiss of life,” a mouth-to-mouth contact that lasted for about five minutes.

After Huston left Key West, Frank—disgusted with the Tennessee and Frederick link—returned to New York.

By this time, Frank had decided to cut himself off completely from Tennessee. But one night, he experienced a sharp pain in his chest, and was rushed to the emergency ward of New York’s Memorial Hospital.

Hearing that Frank was hospitalized, Truman Capote called on him and subsequently spread a horrible (and horribly exaggerated) story throughout the theatrical world that had the ultimate affect of discrediting Tennessee.

Truman had exaggerated, as was his way, asserting that he had found Frank in the hospital’s charity ward. “It was like something from the Middle Ages,” he reported, distorting the conditions at the hospital. “The patients, at least most of them, looked like corpses dug up in the graveyard. They were screaming in pain. Poor Frank is dying in conditions worse than what Olivia de Havilland experienced in that movie of the damned,
The Snake Pit.”

Reacting in horror to the implications of the story, friends of Tennessee shamed him into flying to New York as a means of comforting Frank with financial aid. Arriving at Memorial Hospital, Tennessee had Frank moved, at his expense, to a private room.

Frank received cobalt treatments, which darkened and discolored the skin on his chest. After a few weeks, he was released into Tennessee’s custody. He took him back to his apartment and installed him in his bedroom, establishing a bed for himself on a sofa.

“Each night, Frankie locked his bedroom door,” Tennessee said. “The sound of that lock still haunts me and causes me pain. Did poor Frankie think I was coming in to ravish his skeletal body for my sexual pleasure? Perhaps it wasn’t me, but death that he was locking out. All night lying there on the sofa, I heard Frankie coughing the cough of death.”

As Frank’s condition worsened, Tennessee had him recommitted to Memorial Hospital. This time when he checked in, he arrived in a wheelchair.

“I remember our last night together,” Tennessee said. “I kept urging him to get some sleep. At one point, I asked him if he wanted me to leave so he could get some rest.”

“No,” he said. “I’m used to you.”

Then Frank closed his eyes and drifted off. Those were his last words.

Since it was after official visiting hours, the night nurse asked Tennessee to leave. From the hospital, he went to a local pub and had a few drinks, returning at midnight to check on Frank’s condition.

There, he learned from a doctor that Frank had died at 11PM.

The date was September 21, 1963. At the age of forty, Frank had succumbed to lung cancer after years of heavy smoking.

Tennessee went to the apartment of Elia Kazan. “I spent the afternoon sobbing in his bed. Frankie was dead, and the most dreadful years of my life were upon me. Something told me the worst was yet to come.”

The next day, Tennessee resumed work on
The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore
. He transferred many of his own feelings into the psyche of Flora Goforth, the agonized widow and retired actress he created as a character within the play. “Like her, I would go from room to room for no reason, and then go back from room to room for no reason, and then
out
for no reason. Like Flora, I was in mourning for having abandoned a loved one alone to face death by himself.”

Two days after Frank’s death, Tennessee wrote his friend, Maria St. Just:

“The Little Horse left us two nights ago. He died proudly and stoically. They say he just gasped and lay back on the pillow and was gone. I am just beginning now to feel the desolation of losing my dear Little Horse.”

Gore Vidal was more cynical. “The Bird would mourn Frank ever after, quite forgetting that he had thrown him out several years earlier. A true romantic, the Bird associated love with death. And having lost to brain cancer what he always said was his first love, a dancer, the Bird was now mourning Frank.”

Dotson Rader, the author, became friends with Tennessee in the 1960s. He claimed that the playwright often spoke nostalgically of Frank. “He created the atmosphere that enabled Tennessee to do the finest work of his career. In many ways, Frank was like a wife and mother to Tennessee. He nurtured him, loved him, worried about him, protected, praised, and comforted him, and kept him from harm.”

In the wake of Frank’s death, Tennessee was grief stricken, falling into a depression of drugs and despair that lasted for a decade. In 1969, he suffered a nervous breakdown. His brother, Dakin Williams, had him committed to a mental hospital in St. Louis, where Tennessee was held as a virtual prisoner for three months.

From 1963 to 1969, Tennessee obtained most of his drugs from Dr. Max Jacobson, a German-born doctor in his 60s who administered amphetamines and other medications to such high profile clients as Marlene Dietrich, Cecil B. De-Mille, Eddie Fisher, Elvis Presley, John F. and Jackie Kennedy, Alan Jay Lerner, Mickey Mantle, and Anthony Quinn.

Jacobson was widely known as “Dr. Feelgood.” During one of his profound depressions, Tennessee was taken to Jacobson by Robert McGregor, editor of
New Directions, [a literary review conceived by its founder in 1936 “as a place where experimentalists could test their inventions by publication.”]

Tennessee continued to drink large amounts of alcohol washed down with Nembutal, Seconal, Luminal, and Phenobarbital. He told his friends “I’m staying alive because of this witch doctor I’m going to.”