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) (8 page)

Tennessee remembered turning around to look deeply into the “Slavic blue eyes” of his former lover. Originally, he’d written that Kip’s eyes were “lettuce green.”

When Tennessee saw Kip off to New York, he kissed him goodbye for a final time. Later, he wrote to his friends that “some stupid little girl has persuaded Kip to resist the homosexual world.”

Broken-hearted, Tennessee recorded in is journal, “No bug-house for me, baby. Somewhere, when the heart mends, there is another rare and beautiful stranger waiting for me.”

Later, he wrote that his break with Kip was “only an incident in a long cumulation of tensions and difficulties, actual and psychic, and the result was a sort of temporary obliteration of everything solid in me. All I thought about was my own immediate preservation through change, escape, travel, new scenes, new people.”

He decided to flee from Provincetown for Mexico and adventure.

Before leaving, he wrote Kip in New York on August 22. “I hereby formally bequeath to you the female vagina, whose vortex will inevitably receive you with or without my permission.”

In New York, Kip resumed his study of ballet and married Robin Gregory, a ceremony that made him an American citizen.

During the next few months, he experienced a series of blackouts, which finally forced him into a doctor’s office. After an extensive examination, the physician issued Kip his death notice. “Young man, you have inoperable brain cancer.”

At the age of twenty-five, he knew he had only weeks to live. He contacted two or three of Tennessee’s friends, who managed to reach the elusive playwright. On hearing the news, Tennessee rushed to St. Clare’s Hospital in Manhattan.

There, he met Kip’s wife, who granted him unlimited visitation rights. By the time he’d reached Kip’s bed, the dancer had grown blind, but he was still vaguely coherent.

Tennessee would later write of “the transparent beauty of those who are about to die. Never has the doomed looked as beautiful as Kim. Forget about Greta Garbo in
Camille
. Never has love seemed that ephemeral. He was like one of those breakable glass animals in my first Broadway play,
The Glass Menagerie
. He was the
The Sweet Bird of Youth
in my much later play.”

Three days later, Kip drifted into a death coma. Tennessee was sitting at his bedside at the moment of death. “His hand reached up into the air searching for mine,” Tennessee later wrote in his journal. “I clapsed it and held onto it as he slowly slipped from me and from the world around him, a world, he’d inhabited for such a short time.”

Kip died on May 22, 1944.

Chapter Three

“He’s got a very odd name
. Calls himself Tennessee Williams. He’s written some one-act plays that are very different from what’s out there.”

That was Molly Day Thacher, speaking to her husband, the actor and director, Elia Kazan.
[She would later urge him to direct the stage version of
A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)]

She was a kind of literary scout, a reader going through countless plays, hoping to find properties for the Group Theater. Through producer Harold Clurman, she managed to get Tennessee a special prize of $100 for some of his one-act plays collectively entitled
American Blues
.

She sent him a check for the prize money and a note of encouragement to his address in California. At the time, he was putting in a sixty-hour week, working for Clark’s Bootery in Culver City as a clerk and salesman, which paid only $12.50 a week.

Thacher even got the emerging playwright a literary agent, Audrey Wood, who would become “his mother, his older sister, and his guiding light,” throughout his heyday on Broadway. Along with her husband, William Liebling, she ran the Liebling-Wood Agency at 30 Rockefeller Center.

Bored with California, Tennessee wanted to try his chances in New York. Money was a problem until Wood advanced him the price of a Greyhound bus ticket as an advance on a piece of short fiction, “The Field of Blue Children,” which had been sold to
Story Magazine
.

Tennessee arrived in Manhattan at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Un-shaven and in rumpled clothes, he made his way to the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center. There, he spotted Liebling, who was a casting director auditioning thirty hopeful chorus girls, each showing off her legs. As Tennessee remembered them, they were “chattering like birds high on locoweed.”

He was introduced to Audrey Wood, “a tiny little thing, with very bright eyes. She was witty, bouncing around the room with a certain exuberance. She had hair so bright red it could only have come from a bottle. In all, she reminds me of a porcelain china doll.”

For shelter, he found lodgings in an apartment hotel way up on West 108
^th
Street, which charged $4.50 a week for mostly out-of-work actors and various artists who arrived daily at the Greyhound Bus Station.

Since he had less than ten dollars in his pocket, Tennessee was rescued when Wood persuaded actor Hume Cronyn into taking an option of $50 a month on nine one-act plays by Tennessee.

In a touch of irony, Cronyn would later marry actress Jessica Tandy, who would star on Broadway as Blanche DuBois in
A Streetcar Named Desire
.

There was almost no off-Broadway in those days, and no producer wanted to invest time and money on one-act plays by this unknown Southern writer. Some of these producers considered the plays “the work of a degenerate.”

Eventually, Cronyn’s option expired and Tennessee’s money dwindled. He returned to his family residence in a suburb of St. Louis, where he occupied a bed in the attic. There, he began to work on a long play entitled
Something Wild in the Country
.

“I am writing furiously with seven wild-cats under my skin,” he claimed in a memoir.

The play focused on the social and sexual decadence of a small Southern town. A drifter, Val Xavier, arrives in a snakeskin jacket. Here, he finds employment in the shop of the store’s dying owner and his sexually frustrated wife, Myra. In addition, Xavier gets involved with a local seer and a religious fanatic.

“On the day of my worst depression,” Tennessee recalled, news arrived from Wood. The Dramatists Guild had awarded him a grant of $1,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation. More good news was on the way about his long play, which he’d retitled
Battle of Angels
. The Theater Guild had taken an option on it, which would pay him $100 a month as long as the contract was in effect.

He was aboard the next Greyhound bus pulling out of St. Louis. He arrived in New York in January of 1940 with high hopes.

This time, he lodged on the tenth floor of a dingy and cramped room at the local branch of the YMCA on West 63
^rd
Street. During the day, he worked on
Battle of Angels
on his portable typewriter.

At night, he cruised the Times Square area in search of sailors and G.I.’s. As his brother, Dakin Williams, in Key West told Darwin Porter, “Tennessee admitted to me that he cruised Times Square at night, often for hours at a time. No love was involved, only the thrill of pursuit and temporary pleasures with the momentary object of his desires, meaning those young men who agreed to come back with him to the Y, often because they had been unlucky finding a girl for the night.”

Tennessee himself admitted in print to this “deviant satyriasis which was a round-the-calendar thing, as opposed to animals which have seasons for it.”

In spite of his support from Wood and Thacher, Tennessee felt New York was a lonely place, and he wanted to be back in the Taos desert or in a cottage overlooking the Pacific. As he recorded in his journal: “Most people in New York are involved in their own lives. I need somebody to envelop me, embrace me, pull me by sheer force out of this neurotic shell of fear I’ve built around myself.”

Finding New York too distracting, Tennessee left on a Greyhound for Boston, where he took a boat to Provincetown. Once there, he settled in to rewrite and polish
Battle of Angels
, hoping for a Broadway opening in the late autumn of 1940.

He wrote his mother, Edwina Dakin Williams, that “Miriam Hopkins, Tallula (sic) Bankhead, and even Katharine Cornell were reading
Battle of Angels.”
Tennessee expressed his belief that Bankhead “would be damned good as Myra, not a little short on tenderness but imbued with plenty of richness and drama.”

After writing that, he received word from Wood that another internationally famous actress was also intrigued by the role of Myra.

In New York, Joan Crawford heard that a young playwright had written a strong role for a woman of a certain age in a play called
Battle of Angels
. Crawford knew that both Miriam Hopkins and Tallulah Bankhead, two failed candidates (like herself) for the role of Scarlett O’Hara, were considering making bids for the female lead.