Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (92 page)

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Authors: John Lahr

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary

BOOK: Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh
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1935
He collapses from exhaustion in January, is relieved from his job at the International Shoe Company warehouse, and is sent to Memphis to spend the summer with his grandparents.
A “one-act melodrama” by Dorothy Shapiro and Tom Williams,
Cairo! Shanghai! Bombay!   
is performed by local children in July in the Shapiro’s Memphis backyard.
In the fall Tom audits classes at Washington University in St. Louis, where he meets aspiring poets William Jay Smith and Clark Mills McBurney. Mills introduces Williams and Smith to the poetry of Hart Crane, Rimbaud, Rilke, and others.
1936
Tom is admitted to Washington University in January.
In October his one-act
The Magic Tower   
is produced by the Theatre Guild of Webster Groves, an amateur group just outside of St. Louis.
Attending a touring company of Ibsen’s
Ghosts   
, he sees another inspiring performance by Alla Nazimova.
1937
In March, the Mummers of St. Louis produce his first full-length play,
Candles to the Sun   
.
Rose is committed to a psychiatric ward in St. Louis, then diagnosed with schizophrenia at a Catholic convalescent home. In the summer she is moved to a state hospital in Farmington, Missouri, where she is given shock treatments.
Tom transfers to the University of Iowa in September to study playwriting.
In November the Mummers produce
Fugitive Kind   
.
He completes a draft of
Spring Storm   
.
1938
Williams receives a bachelor’s degree from the University of Iowa in August.
He begins work on
Not about Nightingales   
.
He submits his full-length plays and a    group of one-acts under the name “Tennessee Williams,” and mails them from Memphis on his way to New Orleans, where he arrives for the first time on December 28.
1939
He lives in the French Quarter at 722 Toulouse Street until February 20, when he and Jim Parrott leave on a trip to California.
In August, three one-acts from the series he then calls
American Blues   
wins him “a special prize” of $100 from the Group Theatre. Attention from the prize brings him in contact with Audrey Wood (1905–1985), who becomes his agent.
His name “Tennessee Williams” appears for the first time in print with the publication of “The Field of Blue Children” in the September–October issue of
Story   
magazine.
He receives a $1,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in December.
1940
Williams moves to New York, where he studies playwriting with John Gassner and Erwin Piscator at the New School.
That summer in Provincetown, Massachusetts, he falls in love with a Canadian dancer, Kip Kiernan (1918–1944); their affair lasts only a few weeks.
Williams travels to Mexico in August and September.
The Theatre Guild produces
Battle of Angels   
, which opens out of town in Boston on December 30.
1941
Battle of Angels   
closes in Boston after two weeks. The Broadway run is canceled.
His first published one-act play,
Moony’s Kid Don’t Cry
, appears in
The Best One-Act Plays of 1940   
, edited by Margaret Mayorga (published by Dodd, Mead of New York).
1942
Throughout most of 1941 and 1942, Williams keeps traveling, primarily between New York, St. Louis, New Orleans, Macon, Mexico, Jacksonville, and Provincetown.
At a New York cocktail party in December, he meets lifelong friend and publisher James Laughlin (1914–1997), founder of New Directions Publishing.
1943
On January 13 a bilateral prefrontal lobotomy is performed on Rose.
From mid-May to mid-August, Williams works in Hollywood at $250 a week for MGM, where he is assigned to write scripts for Lana Turner and Margaret O’Brien.
He adapts his draft play “The Gentleman Caller,” based on his short story “Portrait of a Girl in Glass,” for the screen, which MGM rejects.
You Touched Me!
,    co-authored with Donald Windham, opens at the Cleveland Playhouse on October 13.
1944
Williams’s beloved grandmother Rosina—known as “Grand”—dies on January 6.
Kip Kiernan dies from a brain tumor on May 21.
Williams receives $1,000 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
New Directions publishes twenty-six of his poems in
Five Young American Poets, 1944
and the text to
Battle of Angels   
in a literary journal. (Future trade editions of all plays and other writings are published by New Directions unless otherwise indicated.)
The Glass Menagerie   
opens to favorable reviews in Chicago on December 26.
1945
Stairs to the Roof   
premieres at the Pasadena Playhouse in California on March 25.
The Glass Menagerie   
opens on Broadway on March 31 and goes on to win the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best play of the year.
You Touched Me!   
opens on Broadway on September 25 and is later published in an acting edition by Samuel French.
27 Wagons Full of Cotton: And Other One-Act Plays   
is published.
The Glass Menagerie   
is published by Random House.
1946
Williams lives in the French Quarter of New Orleans with Pancho Rodriguez y Gonzales (1921–1995); they live together for the next two years.
1947
Williams meets Frank Merlo (1922–1963) in Provincetown that summer. Beginning in 1948 they become lovers and companions and remain together for nearly fourteen years.
On December 3,
A Streetcar Named Desire   
, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Jessica Tandy, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden, opens on Broadway to rave reviews and wins the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award.
1948
Summer and Smoke   
opens on Broadway on October 6 and closes in just over three months.
A collection of five one-act plays,
American Blues   
, is published by the Dramatists Play Service.
Williams returns to Europe for the first time in a decade and meets Truman Capote and Gore Vidal in Rome.
One Arm and Other Stories   
is published in a limited edition.
1949
   Williams takes his grandfather and Merlo to Key West, where Williams buys the house at 1431 Duncan Street.
1950
His novel
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone   
is published.
He transfers his sister, Rose, to the Stony Lodge clinic near Ossining, New York.
The Warner Brothers film version of
The Glass Menagerie   
is released.
1951
The Rose Tattoo   
, starring Maureen Stapleton and Eli Wallach, opens on Broadway on February 3 and wins the Tony Award for Best Play.
The film version of
A Streetcar Named Desire   
, starring Vivien Leigh as Blanche and Marlon Brando as Stanley, is released.
1952
A revival of
Summer and Smoke   
, directed by José Quintero and starring Geraldine Page, opens Off-Broadway at the Circle in the Square on April 24 and is a critical success.
The American Academy of Arts and Letters inducts Williams as a member.
1953
Camino Real   
, directed by Elia Kazan, opens on Broadway on March 19 and closes within two months after a harsh critical reception.
1954
Hard Candy and Other Stories   
, Williams’s second book of stories, is published.
1955
At the age of ninety-seven, his grandfather the Reverend Dakin dies on February 14.
On March 24,
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Barbara Bel Geddes, Ben Gazzara, and Burl Ives, opens on Broadway.
Cat   
wins both the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award.
The film version of
The Rose Tattoo   
, for which Anna Magnani later wins an Academy Award, is released.
1956
The film
Baby Doll   
, directed by Elia Kazan with a screenplay by Williams, is released amid some controversy and is blacklisted by Cardinal Francis Spellman.
In the Winter of Cities   
, Williams’s first book of poetry, is published.
1957
Orpheus Descending
, a revised version of
Battle of Angels   
, directed by Harold Clurman, opens on Broadway on March 21 and closes after two months.
Williams’s father dies on March 27.
Williams begins psychoanalysis with Dr. Lawrence S. Kubie in June and continues for a year.
1958
On February 7
Suddenly Last Summer
and
Something Unspoken
open Off-Broadway under the collective title
Garden District   
.
The film version of
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof   
, directed by Richard Brooks, is released.
1959
His final collaboration with director Elia Kazan,
Sweet Bird of Youth   
, opens on Broadway on March 10 and runs for three months.
The film version of
Suddenly Last Summer   
, with a screenplay by Gore Vidal, is released.
1960
The comedy
Period of Adjustment   
opens on Broadway on November 10 and runs for over four months.
The film version of
Orpheus Descending
is released under the title
The Fugitive Kind   
.
1961
On December 28
The Night of the Iguana   
opens on Broadway, where it runs for nine months and wins the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award.
The film versions of
Summer and Smoke
and
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone   
are released.
Williams becomes a patient of Dr. Max Jacobson, known as “Dr. Feelgood,” who provides him with injectable forms of barbiturates and amphetamines.
1962
The film versions of
Sweet Bird of Youth
and
Period of Adjustment   
are released.
Williams buys a townhouse at 1014 Dumaine Street in New Orleans’s French Quarter.
1963
The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore   
opens on Broadway on January 16 and closes after two months due to a blizzard and a newspaper strike.
Estranged from Williams for nearly two years, Frank Merlo dies of lung cancer on September 20.
1964
On January 1,
The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore   
is revived in a Broadway production starring Tallulah Bankhead and Tab Hunter; it closes within a week.
John Huston’s film version of
The Night of the Iguana   
is released.
1965
The Eccentricities of a Nightingale
, his revised version of
Summer and Smoke   
, is published.
1966
Two one-act plays,
The Mutilated
and
The Gnadiges Fraulein,
open on Broadway on February 22 under the collective title
Slapstick Tragedy   
and run for seven performances.
A novella and stories are published under the title
The Knightly Quest   
.
1967
His initial version of
The Two-Character Play   
plays at the Hampstead Theatre Club in London and is published in a limited edition.
1968
On March 27
Kingdom of Earth
opens on Broadway under the title
The Seven Descents of Myrtle   
.
A film version of
The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore
, directed by Joseph Losey, is released under the title
Boom!   
1969
Tennessee’s brother, Dakin, arranges for him to convert to Roman Catholicism in a ceremony on January 10.
In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel   
opens Off-Broadway on May 11 and runs for three weeks.
Williams is awarded a doctorate of humanities by the University of Missouri and the Gold Medal for Drama by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in May.
Dakin commits Tennessee to the Renard Psychiatric Division of Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, where he stays for three months.
1970
The film version of
Kingdom of Earth
, with a screenplay by Gore Vidal, is released under the title

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