“A Southern genital-man.”
—what ungentlemanly critic GEORGE JEAN NATHAN called Tennessee Williams
For 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.
THE 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.
Williams reportedly came to regret some of the anti-gay screen changes to which he’d so readily, and profitably, agreed, as in The Night of the Iguana (1964), featuring extra lines—not by Tennessee—ordered by director John Huston which made the lesbian character Miss Fellowes seem more villainous and pathetic. Just as well that by the mid ’60s celluloid adaptations of Williams’s work were no longer guaranteed hits and finally petered out.
Gore Vidal, who remained friends with Tennessee—but not with fellow gay novelist Truman Capote; they had an amity-shattering argument in Tennessee’s home—observed that although Tennessee “survived witch doctors and envenomed press, they wore him out in the end.”
By his late sixties Williams was admitting, “I don’t feel a day over eighty. Not most of the time.” Success or no, he continued writing, which he considered his lifeline. The only time he’d been, as he put it, “scared scriptless,” was when he’d been hired by Hollywood to write heterosexual love dramas. When a British reporter inquired of the gay playwright about loneliness and whether he regretted being “childless”—or child-free—Tennessee responded, “Well, my children are my plays … they are my posterity. And unlike the other kind of offspring, they support me rather lavishly in my old age.”
Tennessee Williams’s body of work is arguably the greatest left behind by any American playwright. But he learned the hard way that personal truth costs. During the painful 1970s he pointed out, “In writing classes, they say, ‘Write about what you know.’ What they don’t say is, ‘Write about what you know unless we disapprove of who you are and what you know.’ ”
“WILLIAM INGE WAS THE EXTREME EXAMPLE of a playwright who killed himself for lack of continuing success,” said Tennessee Williams. “I think that unlike most homosexual playwrights, he felt too little of and about himself.… Without success and the sustenance of acclaim, he chose to end his residency.”
William Inge (1913–1973) put the Midwest on the Broadway map, dramatically speaking. Before him, many Midwestern characters were happy and/or rural, often musical, and frequently shallow. Angst was not part of the scene. Inge’s themes were loneliness, frustration, loss, and despair. His characters craved love, and he was to the Midwest what mentor and, briefly, lover Tennessee Williams was to the South. In the 1950s Inge enjoyed four consecutive Broadway hits: Come Back, Little Sheba, Picnic, Bus Stop, and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs.
Picnic won him a Pulitzer Prize, and he later earned an original-screenplay Academy Award for Splendor in the Grass, a 1961 movie. (The shy ex-instructor had declined to go to the ceremonies in Los Angeles until the studio stopped insisting he attend with a female starlet.) The statuette was Inge’s last glittering piece of professional success.
A deeply closeted man who apparently never lived with and never had a longtime partner, Inge didn’t introduce gay characters into his work until late in his career. His Jewish youth who kills himself because of anti-Semitism in Dark has often been called a stand-in for a homosexual character. Once Inge did include gays, all too often they were stereotypes, and he did not abandon his habit of endorsing majority mores and relationships, only.
Inge had begun as an actor but due partly to parental desires (he was a fifth and final child) focused on teaching. He was an occasional radio news announcer and scriptwriter; also an art, music, book, and drama critic for the St. Louis Star-Times. (St. Louis was Tennessee Williams’s hometown.) A college-level English teacher, Inge grew to hate the profession—although he returned to it temporarily, post-Broadway—and pinned his hopes on a successful play to remove him from it and the Midwest.
(One of Inge’s students, in a dramatics class, was fellow Kansan Vivian Vance, who soon left for what she hoped was Broadway stardom. After middling stage success, she finally achieved national recognition on television in I Love Lucy.)
In 1944, when he met the two-years-older but much more successful Tennessee Williams, William Inge resolved to become a playwright. (Tennessee, visiting St. Louis, accepted Inge’s invitation to visit his apartment, where their intense affair began.) After a positive Theatre Guild tryout in Westport, Connecticut, Come Back, Little Sheba, Inge’s second play, opened on Broadway in 1950. It won praise and prizes for him and star Shirley Booth, who repeated the role on screen and took home an Oscar for it. Picnic proved Inge was no flash in the pan, as did Bus Stop; the movie versions of his plays made him more wealthy and famous. But after The Dark at the Top of the Stairs came a critical backlash. “It amazes me how violent they get when a play is not a hit,” Inge said. “They act as though it were a personal affront to them that such a presentation should be made.”
The onslaught was spearheaded by New Republic critic Robert Brustein, who wrote a poisonous article, widely publicized, in Harper’s, titled “The Men-Taming Women of William Inge.” The young non-playwright slashed Dark and all Inge’s earlier work, which he assessed as mediocre. Brustein’s “charge” of aggressive female characters who tame or put men down in Inge’s plays was the unimaginative but attention-getting tactic of more than one jealous and homophobic reviewer. It was also incorrect insofar as Inge’s women are heavily dependent on their male counterparts, and it applied more accurately to many females in the musicals of heterosexuals Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein—think of Mrs. Anna, Fraulein Maria, Nellie Forbush, and others who put pompous men in their place.
Unfortunately, Inge was devastated by Brustein’s malice and allowed it to interfere with his work. In any event, by the late ’50s change was in more than the air, and many observers felt Inge was increasingly old-fashioned, others that he’d gotten away from the midwestern themes and milieux that had been his forte. His fifth Broadway play, A Loss of Roses, opened in 1959 and was his first flop. Movie rights had sold for a fortune, but the resultant The Stripper with Joanne Woodward was a bomb. All Inge’s subsequent plays failed, and he grew disgusted with Hollywood when his work on the film Bus Riley’s Back in Town (1965) was considerably altered to expand Ann-Margret’s purr-esence. Novels were a last resort, but both sold embarrassingly. After becoming more and more reclusive in the Hollywood Hills, the writer reached rock bottom and chose carbon monoxide poisoning while seated in his Mercedes, weeks after turning sixty.
Shirley Booth, who’d withdrawn from A Loss of Roses before it opened, felt, “That play wasn’t terribly well written, and it wasn’t well rewritten.… The previous ones were better, but what happened shocked him: at the first sign of a weak play, the ill-wishers who’d been holding their tongues suddenly all let loose … they opened fire on Mr. Inge.”
His friend James Leo Herlihy, whose novel All Fall Down Inge adapted for the screen, offered, “Bill was fragile, though he’d come up the hard way.… Success softened him. He got too used to it, and it lowered his defenses. He let that nasty Brustein character pierce him to the core.” Inge later admitted that the critic “represented all the things I feared,” including the intimation that the playwright’s great success had been a fluke. Herlihy, best known for his novel Midnight Cowboy, stated, “Bill had a melancholy streak, as you could guess from his work. But to my mind, that helped his plays. He tapped into something people hadn’t yet articulated about small-town America.
“Bill did care too much what others thought. Then, when other people’s esteem went away, it seemed to leave him with nothing.” Less than a year before his death, William Inge looked back to 1959, to the catastrophe of A Loss of Roses, the play he’d believed was his best yet: “I lost my audience, and I haven’t been able to get it back.”
Inge’s sister, with whom he lived and who found his body, lamented, “Sometimes, just the fear of writer’s block froze him up. And I don’t think he even had any writer’s block.… Writing was his life. He had no other interests.”