Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America Read online

  These are very intimate, difficult moments for any writer, yet the two remained friends. It’s hard to say what drew them together. It wasn’t sexual attraction. Once when they went out cruising together, they returned empty-handed. “That leaves only us,” said Williams. “Don’t be macabre,” Vidal replied. Williams was far more famous, yet the competitive novelist did not resent his older peer. Vidal recognized early that he was smarter than Williams, more logical and literate. Yet he never denied Williams’s poetic gifts and power. Usually so proud and guarded, Vidal later wrote about Williams in essays with genuine affection, showing a tenderness that rarely appears in his work. But the respect was not entirely mutual. The playwright described his first meetings with Vidal in a letter to Windham: “I liked him but only through the strenuous effort it took to overlook his conceit. He has studied ballet and is constantly doing pirouettes and flexing his legs, and the rest of the time he is comparing himself and Truman Capote (his professional rival and Nemesis) to such figures as Dostoyevsky and Balzac.”

  Williams went off to London for the rehearsal of John Gielgud’s production of Menagerie starring Helen Hayes, then came to Paris where he met up again with Vidal. He brought Vidal along as translator when he met with Jean Cocteau to discuss a French production of Streetcar to star Cocteau’s boyfriend, Jean Marais. Vidal gives a witty account of the meeting: “Between Tennessee’s solemn analyses of the play and Cocteau’s rhetoric about the theater (the long arms flailed like semaphores denoting some dangerous last junction) nobody made any sense at all until Marais broke his long silence to ask, apropos his character Stanley Kowalski, ‘Will I have to use a Polish accent?’ ”

  Then Truman Capote arrived in Paris. Vidal’s distrust had been building since Capote upstaged everyone in the photo pages of Life, but he introduced his rival to Williams. Always anxious to entertain, Capote worked harder than ever to impress the famous playwright. He told Williams and Vidal tales of Hollywood movie deals, meetings with starlets, and his own romantic encounters with André Gide, Errol Flynn, and Albert Camus—encounters that have never been verified. Williams was wary and uncertain. Later, when he grew fond of Capote, he would say he was “full of fantasies and mischief.” Vidal would call him an outright liar. The three went to a Paris nightclub one night, and Capote attempted to get Vidal out on the dance floor for the latest song from America, “Bongo, bongo, bongo, I don’t want to leave the Congo.” Vidal refused.

  October found all three men back in New York, photographed together at a party with drinks and grins, looking like good buddies at a college mixer. Yet Vidal’s dislike of Capote was already so strong he found it difficult to be in the same room or even the same city with him. Colleagues began to make jokes about his rivalry, one man telling the tale of a cross-country trip where they stopped at every public library so Vidal could see if his books were checked out as often as Capote’s. Vidal later wrote, “It’s not enough to succeed, our friends must fail.” One assumes he had a particular “friend” in mind.

  Williams had returned to New York for the rehearsals of Summer and Smoke. This is a surprisingly quiet play for him, a period piece mixing comedy and melancholy set in the golden age before the First World War, the tale of two friends, a man and a woman, who almost become lovers. It received bad reviews and closed early. Williams was devastated. Summer and Smoke didn’t find success until its revival in 1952.

  He published a novel, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, in 1950, and won a Tony for his next play, The Rose Tattoo, in 1951. And he met Frank Merlo, a short, dark, handsome young man with Sicilian roots and lots of practicality. Williams nicknamed him “Little Horse.” Merlo provided an anchor for the playwright in the coming years, an anchor Williams didn’t always want. They took a house in Key West, where Williams’s grandfather frequently stayed with them. Williams spent his mornings writing, his afternoons swimming, and his evenings drinking, but he couldn’t meet new men at night while he lived with Frank. He grew restless again.

  He followed Rose Tattoo with a curious experiment, Camino Real, a dream play in ten scenes that explores the conflict of romance and realism using a cast of characters that range from Don Quixote to Casanova to the American Everyman, Kilroy (as in the G.I. graffiti, “Kilroy was here”). One scene features the Baron de Charlus, Marcel Proust’s remarkable creation, the first great gay character in literature. The play was a complete failure, rejected by both critics and the public, but not because of Charlus. Some have speculated it was perceived as anti-American, but it’s too elusive to be perceived as anything. It’s loose, scattered, and cerebral, Williams’s least emotional work. As Windham and others have said, his writing is emotional or it is nothing.

  A writer’s unconscious is difficult to read, but the imagination is rooted in the unconscious. Williams had run out of imaginative energy. I believe he was now trying, consciously or not, to find a way to use his sexuality in his work. Eroticism is an important part of most artists’ creativity. A gay writer can produce a book or two while ignoring his or her sexuality and still do good work. Innocence helps for a spell. Yet it’s difficult to keep one’s real sexuality buried for too long without the work suffering. Windham called Mrs. Stone the first of his friend’s “fictional self-portraits after his success,” but giving your promiscuity to a fifty-something widow doesn’t let you express your full body and soul. Rose Tattoo was a heterosexual love story about yet another widow, Serafina, and an Italian fisherman, Alvaro, using pieces of Williams and Merlo, but the disguise smothered any self-expression. With Charlus in Camino Real, Williams let the cat out of the bag, so to speak, but it wasn’t enough. The need was still there, stronger than ever, and it fed his next play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

  Gay sexuality was in a tricky position in American theater after the war, even more vulnerable than it was in the book trade. Then as now, the theater was full of gay people and more accepting of homosexuality than the rest of the country. Yet producers not only worried about how audiences would respond to gay matter, they worried about the police. Still on the books was a 1927 law—Section 1140-A of New York City’s Criminal Code, known as the Wales Padlock Law. A theater found guilty of showing “an immoral play”—which included any presentation of homosexuality, good or bad—could be shut down for a year. The law was rarely used but had been invoked to close Dorothy Baker’s Trio in 1945. Producers cited it whenever they wanted to cut a gay character or adjust a story line. Nevertheless, Danny Kaye was free to play a flamboyant fashion photographer in the musical Lady in the Dark in 1944 and John Huston was able to stage Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit in 1946 despite its predatory lesbian. There was even a play version of Calder Willingham’s End as a Man in 1952, with the homosexual sadist identified as only a sadist.

  So homosexuality was not completely forbidden, but it was in a tight spot. One solution was to tell stories that weren’t about real homosexuality but about false accusations of it. In the Fifties we get a string of plays with this device: Tea and Sympathy by Robert Anderson (1953), The View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller (1955), and the 1952 revival of The Children’s Hour by Lillian Hellman (where the accusation turns out to be true, but not until the last scene). The theater strived to have it both ways, which had a strong effect on the writing and rewriting of Cat.

  It began as a short story, “Three Players of a Summer Game,” about a game of croquet in the 1920s played by a former athlete, Brick Pollitt, a local widow, and the widow’s little girl. The story is told by a small boy who doesn’t fully understand what he sees. We hear about Brick’s wife, Margaret, whose coldness has driven Brick to drink and into the arms of the widow. In the end the widow is defeated and Margaret recaptures Brick—we’re not sure exactly how. The story is all summer mood and grown-up mystery.

  Williams turned it into a play and it became an entirely new animal. We see how radically he rethought and reinvented old material when he rewrote. He shifts the story from the past to the present. A game of croquet is still taking p
lace outside, but we’re in the house now, alone with Brick and Margaret. Brick is still a former athlete and he still drinks. But cold, bossy Margaret has become Maggie the Cat, a spirited, immensely likable woman who loves her husband and wants to save their marriage. The widow, daughter, and child narrator are gone, replaced with Brick’s brother and sister-in-law and their five “no-neck monsters.” And dominating all is Brick’s boisterous, cancer-haunted father, Big Daddy.

  It is a mad, brilliant mess of a play, half soap opera, half comedy, with some of the funniest dialogue Williams ever wrote. The airy vagueness of Camino Real is gone. Big Daddy was based on Williams’s own father, yet any autobiographical elements are split and distorted and reconfigured in the funhouse mirror of the author’s imagination. Williams liked to say that he was all his characters; here different pieces of Williams argue and woo and bond with each other. Maggie burns to win Brick back, like an ex-spouse in a screwball comedy, the genre philosopher Stanley Cavell called “the comedy of remarriage.” Why doesn’t Brick love her anymore? Williams’s imagination drew upon the subject he itched to use: homosexuality. But then the artist—or his unconscious—changed his/its mind about how far to go. Brick had been close to a fellow athlete, Skipper, now dead. Had the two men loved each other? Or had Skipper loved Brick without being loved back? Or did Brick only imagine their friendship was impure because other people thought so? Williams kept shifting back and forth and the subject became messier and messier. When Brick and Big Daddy throw the word mendacity at each other, one can’t help hearing Williams cast a similar charge of lying against himself.

  He wanted Elia Kazan to direct the play, thinking only Kazan could give him another commercial success like Streetcar. He badly needed a hit, not so much for the money as for his own mental well-being. Kazan asked for more rewrites before he finally agreed to direct. Then he asked for a new third act, which Williams gave him. Then Kazan barred Williams from rehearsals.

  Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened in March 1955, starring Ben Gazzara, Barbara Bel Geddes, and Burl Ives. It was a huge success, praised by the critics and loved by audiences, and it eventually won the Pulitzer. But Williams wasn’t sure what it meant anymore. When he published the play in book form, he included both third acts, even though they’re not very different: each ends with Maggie winning Brick. The new version includes a thunderstorm and Big Daddy returns for the finale, as Kazan requested, but Williams never satisfied Kazan’s other request, which was that Brick respond to Big Daddy’s second-act charge that he drank because he had been in love with Skipper. Despite this silence, several reviewers wondered about Brick’s sexuality. Walter Kerr compared the accusation in Cat to the one in The Children’s Hour, implying it was true. (Reviewers were often very polite in the 1950s.) Williams went into a panic. He wanted his play to be understood, but he didn’t want it understood too well. He wrote a response to Kerr, but didn’t send it. He added a long stage direction to the book edition trying to explain Brick’s sexuality but only confused things further.

  The experience left him completely exhausted. He achieved his success, but it did not make him feel better. He now suffered a major case of writer’s block. And writer’s block for a man who writes every day can be as frightening as an inability to breathe. All he could do was drink, like Brick, which only made the problem worse.

  Alcohol will be a recurring subject in this book, as important as sex and love and success for these artists. Gay men are hardly alone here. Booze affected the lives of many twentieth-century American authors. Tom Dardis in The Thirsty Muse identifies two traditions of writers, those who drank—Eugene O’Neill, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner—and those who didn’t—Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens. Alcohol and drugs deeply stamped the careers of more than one figure in our story.

  Drinking only deepened problems that were already present, in much the same way that Williams’s mixed feelings about his sexuality only fed his paralysis. It’s hard to distinguish between cause and effect here. Williams eventually took up an old play, Battle of Angels, and rewrote it into Orpheus Descending. It opened to the worst reviews he had yet received. He became so unhappy that he did what friends had been suggesting for years: he began to see a psychiatrist. And the man he chose was Dr. Lawrence S. Kubie.

  Kubie was a famous figure with a lot of experience treating writers with sexual issues, including William Inge, Charles Jackson (author of The Lost Weekend), and Moss Hart. He insisted patients see him three to four times a week. One would love to know what the Williams sessions were like, but Kubie ordered his records destroyed after his death. Williams told his mother, “He said I wrote cheap melodramas and nothing else.” In his Memoirs he says Kubie wanted him to give up not only sex with men but writing, too. What he wrote to Kazan shortly after ending treatment is probably closer to the truth: “He said I was overworked and must quit and ‘lie fallow,’ as he put it, for a year or so, and then resume work in what he declared would be a great new tide of creative power, which he apparently thought would come out of my analysis with him.” Williams stopped seeing Kubie after eight months.

  Analysis does not seem to have done him much good. He continued to drink and soon added barbiturates and amphetamines to his routine. But the psychiatric experience strongly influenced his next play, Suddenly Last Summer, an extended one-act written while he was still seeing Kubie. Some people love it; I don’t. A mad, gothic-fever dream of a play, it succeeds best as the tale of a young woman hospitalized after being exploited by her rich gay cousin and the cousin’s mother. But it’s also an attack on Williams’s own sexual appetite. The author ends the play by giving his gay predator a cannibal death that might seem racist and offensive if it weren’t so preposterous. (It is so absurd that I want to think Williams was laughing off his own fantasy.) Nevertheless, Kubie admired the work, singling out for special praise the sensitive portrait of the doctor.

  Psychiatry in later decades might have helped Williams, but the profession in the 1950s could do little for him.

  Meanwhile Capote and Vidal had crossed into playwriting themselves, Capote adapting his novel The Grass Harp for the stage in 1952, and Vidal coming to theater by way of television, expanding a TV drama into a satirical play, Visit to a Small Planet, in 1957. His friend, novelist Dawn Powell, ran into Vidal in the lobby on opening night and teased him. “How could you give up The Novel? Give up the security! The security of knowing that every two years there will be—like clockwork—that five-hundred-dollar advance!”

  Williams never felt threatened or competitive over his friends’ entry into his realm, partly because their success never came close to his, but also because other people were never as important to Tennessee as he sometimes was to them.

  3. Howl

  Plays are more public than novels, and novels more public than short stories. Tennessee Williams wrote and published several gay short stories at this time, including “One Arm” and “Desire and the Black Masseur,” without attracting too much attention. (Nor was he able to express this side of himself fully enough that he could let go of it.) But the least public genre of all, the most private, is poetry. The privacy consists in how few people read it, and how discreet and even obscure a poem can be and still succeed.

  Nevertheless, the next important work in our story is a long poem by Allen Ginsberg, which was anything but discreet. The poem and its publisher ended up in court in San Francisco, and in newspapers across the country.

  American poetry before World War II was dominated by straight men: Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. The only major woman was Marianne Moore. The late Hart Crane was known to have been gay, but he was read only by avant-garde readers like Tennessee Williams. Walt Whitman radiated homosexuality, but the New Critics didn’t trust Whitman: he was too sloppy, too vulgar. (The critics were silent about his love of men, but Whitman himself was evasive about it in his last years. It didn’t stop the
next generations of gay readers from using him as a hero and an example.)

  After the war, a handful of gay poets began to use their sexuality in their work in a quiet, matter-of-fact manner that didn’t proclaim their difference but didn’t hide it, either. Their gayness was an open secret, which meant gay readers could see themselves in the work while straight readers could still play dumb.

  W. H. Auden came to America just before the war. He was very sociable and soon known in the gay literary circles of New York. His sexuality did not appear directly in his work, but by deft use of the second person (“Lay your sleeping head my love/Human on my faithless arm”) and double meanings (an exclamation like “O God!” could be both religion and camp), he showed how gay experience could be incorporated into poetry without lying. Within a few years, a young art lover, Frank O’Hara, who worked in the bookstore of the Museum of Modern Art, was writing free and easy poems to his friends. (But the poems he printed only hinted at the life he led. His carefree evocation of a pack of pals going out dancing, “At the Old Place”—“Wrapped in Ashes’ arms I glide./(It’s heaven!) Button lindys with me. (It’s/heaven!)”—was written in 1955, but not published until 1969, the year of Stonewall.) Other young gay poets—James Schuyler, James Merrill, Richard Howard, and John Ashbery—were also appearing in print, but the gay takeover of New York poetry took place in secret, between the lines. The public eruption happened elsewhere, with a poem that some considered too raw to be called poetry from a poet many still believe to be more a genius of publicity than one of verse.