Broadway Babylon (10 page)

F
or quite a long run, Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) was Americas foremost playwright. He ruled over Broadway in the 1950s and via film versions of his plays became a household name. A “Tennessee Williams play” was a theatrical genre of its own, and during the repressed post-war era audiences flocked to see and be titillated by his very “adult” plays. “He leaves comedy to the jokers and kids,” said Bette Davis, who did his
The Night of the Iguana
on Broadway. “Tennessee delivers the dramatic goods, and he
really
understands women.”

Tennessee (born Tom) was the first major playwright widely known to be “that way,” and for that reason, several myths sprang up about him and his work, some of them still flourishing. One centers on one of his most famous characters, Blanche DuBois in
A Streetcar Named Desire
. She is but one of Williams’s mature, glamorous, on-her-own women, often drawn to crude younger hunks. Like various of Tennessee’s characters, she’s somewhat neurotic; however, some critics labeled Blanche neurotic simply because she fancied handsome young men—others equated the attraction with veiled homoeroticism.

A popular theory held that Blanche was originally intended as a male character. Such thinking imagined that a gay writer’s female creations cannot be genuine—as opposed to heterosexual men’s females?—and are actually
camouflaged males. A related myth held that Blanche is really Tennessee, or what he’d like to be. That myth took a while to gel, for the immediate “scandal” produced by
Streetcar
was that a man, Stanley Kowalski, was the object of desire and that the lust came from a woman, Blanche.

As with the outspokenly sexual Mae West (frequently rumored to be a man; she wasn’t), such an inversion of tradition disturbed the status quo and somehow made questionable the femaleness of the woman who lusted. Immemorial custom had it that the pursuer be masculine, the lusted-after feminine. Tennessee Williams broke this rule with his 1947 hit play. Years later, when a friend opined that there was as much Blanche as Stanley in Tennessee, the media seized on—only—the first half of the statement as an “explanation” for her staring at Stanley’s bared torso with undisguised lust.

Though many or most of Williams’s plays are partly autobiographical, especially his early success
The Glass Menagerie
, in which he didn’t bother to re-work Tom as “straight,”
Streetcar
’s Blanche is
not
Tennessee. Rather, to quite a degree she’s inspired by his older sister, Rose. Rose had definitely been the model for his
Menagerie
sister, Laura, and his mother, Edwina, the basis for the play’s mother, Amanda.
The
Glass Menagerie
is almost cheerfully minus a father, absent because he “fell in love with long distance.” Unfortunately for Tennessee, Cornelius Williams, a loutish alcoholic, was very much in residence off the stage.

In the preface to his collected short stories, Tennessee, who seldom alluded to his younger brother, Dakin, in his work or publicity, wrote of his father: “He always enters the house as though he were entering it with the intention of tearing it down from inside.” Except when returning after midnight, drunk.

Rose eventually let it be known that her father had made drunken sexual advances toward her. Cornelius denied it, while Edwina was mortified by any such talk in her household. In order to prevent Rose’s repeating the deeply disturbing accusation, Edwina arranged for her daughter to undergo one of the first lobotomies. The prudish matriarch, who later turned Cornelius out after he was hospitalized for a drunken binge, said she wouldn’t be able to live with her husband if she had to believe such a wicked thing about him.

The lobotomy in effect erased Rose as an individual. She was no longer a worry to her parents, especially after being put away. However, Rose’s fate became a deep and lifelong source of regret for her devoted brother, who gradually turned against their puritanical mother and came to sympathize with his father. The lobotomy provided a seed for Tennessee’s short play,
Suddenly, Last Summer
, in which a puritanical woman tries to lobotomize a niece who correctly insinuates that her late cousin Sebastian was homosexual.

T
HE INAPPROPRIATE HETEROSEXUAL BEHAVIOR
attributed to Cornelius Williams echoes and is magnified in the rape of Blanche DuBois by
brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski in
A Streetcar Named Desire
. The tendency to over-identify Blanche with her creator overlooks the play’s very real theme of violence against women. Edwina is partly reflected in Blanche’s sister, Stella, who following her husband’s rape of Blanche allows her to be taken off to be put away (and perhaps lobotomized). Stella wonders, “I don’t know if I did the right thing.” Blanche famously informs the men in white that she has “always depended on the kindness of strangers.” Strangers who, as in real life, are sometimes less emotionally fatal than family members. (A recent study gives the chances of an American female being sexually abused before age eighteen as one in four, usually by a family member.)

Stella tellingly declares, “I couldn’t believe her story and go on living with Stanley,” to which Eunice, a traditionalist friend, advises, “Don’t ever believe it. Life has got to go on.”

Ironically, the sexual violence in
A Streetcar Named Desire
and its screen version was mitigated by the casting in both of the enormously attractive Marlon Brando, who was also too young for the role, which Williams had envisioned as closer in age to his father. Brando glamorized Kowalski (note the
k
sound, as in “Cornelius”), making him more commercially appealing. He inadvertently made the rape scene seem less an act of evil than a possibly secret fantasy—not so secret on the part of some heterosexual women and some gay men. Tennessee felt that Marlon’s youthful beauty “humanizes the character of Stanley in that it becomes the brutality or callousness of youth rather than a vicious older man.”

To his surprise, Marlon was identified with Stanley by Tennessee Williams:

“Tennessee has made a fixed association between me and Kowalski. I mean, we’re friends and he knows that as a person I am just the opposite of Kowalski, who was everything I’m against—totally insensitive, crude, cruel. But still, Tennessee’s image of me is confused with the fact that I played that part. So I don’t know if he could write for me in a different color range.”

If
Streetcar
does have a character based on Williams, it would be Blanche’s late homosexual husband, Allan (note the double
l’
s in both names), a sensitive soul and a poet. Tennessee Williams always considered himself a poet at heart and often aired his belief that like his role model, gay poet Hart Crane, he would die young. Deeply personal poems are embedded in various of Tennessee’s plays. But as with the murdered Sebastian Venable in
Suddenly, Last Summer
, the suicidal Allan doesn’t actually appear in Williams’s play. Gay characters in his early plays were typically spoken of, rather than fleshed out, and were, of course, stereotyped.

The playwright usually readily agreed to censorship of movies of his work and practiced self-censorship in his plays, reasoning that a watered-down message reaching a wide audience was better than an undiluted one reaching very few—“though generally I try to leave messages to Western Union, you know.”

The myth is that America’s first semi-openly gay playwright (eventually openly gay) was: (a) pro-gay and thus “biased” toward gay characters, (b) “obsessed” with injecting homosexuality into his plays, and (c) was far ahead of his time in so doing. Williams was prescient in delineating psychosexual—occasionally including homosexual—themes and motivations in his avant-garde plays. However, his treatment of non-heterosexual characters and themes was very much of its era; similarly in his less self-censored short stories. Tennessee’s gays are stereotypical, hated, and self-hating.

His Baron de Charlus in
Camino Real
(1953) contemplates a sexual interlude comprising “an iron bed with no mattress and a considerable length of stout knotted rope.” Too often, Tennessee’s homosexuals don’t enjoy sex, or they require it in S/M fashion. The Baron requires “Chains this evening, metal chains, I’ve been very bad, I have a lot to atone for.”

Death prematurely takes too many of Williams’s gay characters, who frequently instigate their own demises. Ergo, even while the playwright was “daring” in even broaching how the other tenth purportedly lives—and loves—or that it even existed, he habitually placated authorities, critics, and average theatergoers by depicting and terminating his gay characters in the traditionally approved way. Williams’s plays are
not
brimming with gays and lesbians. Time and again, a gay theatergoer’s reaction to encountering one of Tennessee’s gay characters—they almost never come in pairs—turns quickly from pleasure or validation to embarrassment or anger at the artist’s heavy-handed and disappointing methods.

In any case, the myth that the playwright’s female characters were disguised men or based on himself doesn’t hold water. A great many were partly based on his mother or sister. His women, older or younger, often embody the iniquitous and cruel circumstances inflicted by men and by women who uphold patriarchy’s double standard. If Williams “pleads,” it’s less for his fellow gays than for the young and the old Roses—blossoms trapped and crushed by a society not of their own devising.

It was this early feminism, as much as his incorporating even a whiff of lavender, that drew the establishment’s ire. Any man who underlined women’s problems would have been suspect, a “traitor” to male-heterosexual hegemony. As Tennessee’s sexual and affectional orientation became known, yet not openly written about, critical indignation grew. “Fetid swamp” was
Time
reviewer Louis Kronenberger’s phrase of preference for describing the playwright’s output and “obsessions.” Since Tennessee’s plays often dealt with neuroses, he was himself labeled neurotic by detractors neurotically obsessed with keeping homosexual men in their “place.”

Under the aegis of far-right religious zealot Henry Luce,
Time
magazine for three decades spearheaded the anti–Tennessee Williams charge, invariably
assigning his plays negative reviews. In the early 1950s
Time
had gone so far as to label Williams a “pervert” in print. Shy, relatively new to the limelight, and vulnerable, he didn’t sue, and the media made him a habitual target.
Time
and other reactionary periodicals’ ongoing theme regarding Tennessee Williams’s plays was, “This is what our nation is coming to.” When the 1959 film of
Suddenly, Last Summer
, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, and Katharine Hepburn became a hit,
Time
critic Richard Schickel monopolistically bemoaned, “Why do we have to have all of this homosexuality in our movies?”

The
New York Times
was anti-Tennessee too, and by the late ’60s when he was in steep commercial decline, it became universally “in” to bash him. Henry Luce’s
Life
magazine took out a full-page ad in the
Times
to sell issues by criticizing Williams.

When Tennessee had included passing homosexuality in his early works, there had been nervous indignation, but his newer plays, with their undisguised and unmarried gay characters, elicited ever-greater media contempt and vituperation. Instead of allowing that the playwright was, like most mature artists, moving in new, less dollar-oriented directions toward a more specific, personal truth, critics dismissed his latest plays out of hand and declared that he was “past it” and his output no longer worthwhile.

Several of his later, “smaller” plays have been posthumously acclaimed and withstood the test of time, but Williams, after people stopped flocking to his plays, was no longer in fashion. After he stopped writing for wider audiences and his runs grew shorter, vengeful detractors could and did make a difference. Word of mouth, from fewer mouths, counted for less than biased reviewers’ judgments, regardless of a given play’s merits. Then too, people were no longer so easily shocked—thanks to Tennessee, among others—and a “shocking” theme no longer automatically brought in the crowds.

The mostly hostile critical reaction to Williams’s plays was ironic in that his treatment of gay characters didn’t evolve much. As late as the 1972
Small Craft Warnings
he had a character ruing the alleged fact that “There’s a coarseness, a deadening coarseness, in the experience of most homosexuals”—never mind that homophobia is both coarse and deadening. Among the worst anti-gay influences working upon the impressionable playwright had been a homophobic psychiatrist to whom he’d trustingly, or masochistically, submitted his troubled psyche. Like many gay men of his era, Tennessee didn’t have sex with somebody else until late—his late twenties—and when his shrink ordered him to stop having sex and even give up Frank Merlo, his devoted partner of fourteen years, he did. After Merlo died young of cancer, Williams was remorseful for the rest of his life.