James Grissom - Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A . KNOPF

Copyright 2015 by James Grissom

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to HarperCollins Publishers for permission to reprint Youth from New and Collected Poems: 19312001 by Czesaw Miosz, copyright 1988, 1995, 2001 by Czesaw Miosz Royalties, Inc. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Grissom, James.

Follies of God : Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog / James Grissom. First edition.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-307-26569-2 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-101-87465-3 (eBook)

1. Williams, Tennessee, 19111983Criticism and interpretation. 2. Characters and characteristics in literature. 3. Women in literature.

I. Title.

PS 3545. I 5365 Z 666 2015 812.54dc23 2014021046

Jacket photograph courtesy of the Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sothebys

Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson

v3.1

Four women made the writing of this book possible:

Winnie Hubbard Grissom

Marian Seldes

Dr. Dale V. Atkins

Rose Byrnes

And one made it publishable:

Victoria Wilson

I have been very lucky. I am a multi-souled man, because I have offered my soul to so many women, and they have filled it, repaired it, sent it back to me for use.

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

Tennessee Williams in Jackson Square, 1977 (Christopher R. Harris)

Marlon Brando and Maureen Stapleton on the set of The Fugitive Kind, 1959 (Photofest)

Tennessee Williams and Maureen Stapleton, 1975 (Photofest)

The garden behind St. Louis Cathedral

Eva Le Gallienne, c. 1920 (Photofest)

Clarence Brown, 1940s (Photofest)

Miriam Hopkins, 1930s (Photofest)

Lillian Gish on Cielo Drive, 1940s (Photofest)

Lillian Gish, mid-1930s (Photofest)

Lillian and Dorothy Gish, 1960s (Diane Arbus)

John Gielgud, 1970s (John Hedegcoe)

Jessica Tandy, 1947 (Carl Van Vechten)

Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Lillian Gish, John Gielgud, 1966 (Corbis)

Irene Selznick, Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan, unidentified man, 1947 (Ruth Orkin)

Lois Smith, 1955 (Photofest)

Laurette Taylor, 1940s (Photofest)

Ida Lupino and Joan Leslie in The Hard Way; Jennifer Jones in The Song of Bernadette, 1943 (Photofest)

Marian Seldes, 1960 (Getty Images)

Hermione Baddeley and Mildred Dunnock in The Milk Train Doesnt Stop Here Anymore, 1963 (Photofest)

Tallulah Bankhead, 1930s (Photofest)

Frances Sternhagen, 1970s (Photofest)

Julie Harris in The Member of the Wedding, 1950 (Photofest)

Isak Dinesen and Carson McCullers, 1959 (Corbis)

Jos Quintero, 1950s (Photofest)

Kim Hunter, early 1950s (Corbis)

William Inge, 1950s (Photofest)

Elia Kazan and William Inge, 1961 (Photofest)

Barbara Baxley, 1960 (Photofest)

Geraldine Page, 1961 (Photofest)

Geraldine Page, 1962 (Photofest)

Luchino Visconti, 1936 (Horst P. Horst)

Mildred Natwick, mid-1940s (Photofest)

Jo Van Fleet, 1957 (Photofest)

Kim Stanley, 1960s

Katharine Cornell, 1940s (Photofest)

Lee Strasberg, 1950s (Photofest)

Kim Stanley and Paul Massie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 1958 (BEI Images/Rex USA)

Truman Capote, c. late 1940s (Photofest)

Ellis Rabb, 1970s

Rosemary Harris, 1950s

Eva Le Gallienne and Rosemary Harris, 1975 (Photofest)

Katharine Hepburn, 1955 (Photofest)

Katharine Hepburns letter to author, 1990

Katharine Hepburn, 1959 (Photofest)

Stella Adler, 1943 (Photofest)

Irene Worth, 1950s (Photofest)

Tennessee Williams, early 1940s (Photofest)

P ERHAPS YOU can be of some help to me.

These were the first words Tennessee Williams spoke to me in that initial phone call to my parents home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It was September of 1982, a fact I noted in a small blue book. The book was new and had been purchased for an upcoming test in World History that I would not be taking because Tennessee invited me to lunch in New Orleans, and I accepted.

I know that pleasantries were exchanged, and he laughed a lota deep, guttural, silly theatrical laughbut the first quotation attributable to Tennessee Williams to me was the one I wrote in my small blue book.

Perhaps you can be of some help to me.

How could I be of help to Tennessee Williams? How, when in fact I had written to him, several months before, seeking his help? From a battered paperback copy of Whos Who in the American Theatre, I had found the address of his agent (Audrey Wood, c/o International Famous Agency, 1301 Avenue of the Americas), and had written a letterlengthy and containing a photograph, and, Im thankful, lost to us foreverasking for his advice on a writing career. I wrote that his work had meant the most to me; that I was considering a career in the theater. I also enclosed two short stories, both written for a class taken at Louisiana State University. It was a time I recall as happy: I was writing, and exploiting the reserves of the schools library and its liberal sharing policy with other schools. I was poring over books and papers that related to Tennessee and other writers I admired.

Tennessee (he told me, by the end of that first phone call, to call him Tenn) was in a horrible knot of time. He asked me to imagine a knot of time, but time for me at that point was something from which I was seeking favors, something I was approaching. I did not feel a part of time yet, which can be somewhat attributable to growing up and living in Baton Rouge, a city detached from time, thought, or curiosity. Tenn acknowledged with a laugh that Baton Rouge was a city encased in gelatin.

Tenn, however, could see and feel a literal knot of time and people and places encircling him, choking him, pursuing him. While he told me that he could no longer dream, due to age, a lack of flexibility both glandular and creative, and the monumental accretion of toxins self-administered, he was, comically, fully equipped to endure nightmares. His most frequent nightmare, one he had endured the night before he chose to call me, consisted of his slow, painful death by means of a massive knot, bearing the image of an enormous boa constrictor as well as an artistic representation of a penis, encircling him and squeezing him into darkness and death. The scales of this boa were faces of people and covers of books and posters of plays (both his and others), travel brochures of trips planned, taken, aborted. The faces of the people and the blurbs on the books and the posters all posed the same question: Where have you been?