1953 What British poet has ever claimed such celebrity in America as Dylan Thomas? Certainly not his contemporaries Stephen Spender or W.H. Auden, or any other would-be traveller or settler in the States. Celebrities are sought out for who they are as much as for what they do. So that lets out even Famous Seamus Heaney, whose outstanding work overshadows his amiable and self-depreciating personality.
It was the poet and critic John Malcolm Brinnin who first brought Thomas to America. An admirer of Thomas’s poems, he raised $500 – the equivalent of around $4,500 today – plus his air fare, for him to read his work at a poetry centre he ran in New York, and with his good contacts he was able to arrange for the poet to read at over 40 schools and colleges across the country.
Audiences loved his Byronic exuberance, his sonorous voice, his ‘Welsh lilt’, not knowing that between them Thomas and his schoolmaster father had managed to expunge all traces of his native Swansea from his plummy accent. Byron by day, maybe, more like Borat the Kazakh by night. Exhilarated by his reception, invited to endless drinks parties, he would get drunk and foul-mouthed, playing up to his persona of the troubled romantic, leering at the college girls and offering to suckle their breasts.
Breasts also came into a well-reported incident in Hollywood. Introduced to Shelley Winters, Thomas told the actress that his two ambitions in Hollywood were to ‘touch the titties of a beautiful blonde starlet and to meet Charlie Chaplin’. Winters, then sharing a flat with Marilyn Monroe, invited the poet to dinner. They drank dry martinis out of milk bottles. Winters cooked and Monroe washed up (Marilyn’s idea of making a salad was first to brush each lettuce leaf with a Brillo pad, Winters recalled in her autobiography), then Thomas did indeed get to touch the starlet’s titties, but only with a single finger, one at a time.
Afterwards they drove over to one of Chaplin’s weekly open house parties. With the drunken Thomas fatally at the wheel, they crashed onto Chaplin’s tennis court, into the net. When his hero deprecated his bad behaviour, Thomas strolled out into the solarium and urinated on a large specimen plant.
The truth is, his offended hosts, so smitten by the notion that he was a great creative talent, colluded in the mischief and enjoyed the fun. In all, Thomas visited the US four times between 1950 and 1953 – for ‘flattery, idleness and infidelity’, according to the sour but accurate judgement of his long-suffering wife Caitlin. Besides, the money was good – not least for Brinnin, who, as Thomas’s agent, took a hefty 25 per cent of the poet’s earnings.
Then, just as he was on the verge of signing a contract for future readings and lecture tours for $12,000 a week, the fun ran out. In October 1953, suffering from a chest complaint, he arrived at New York’s Idlewild airport, to be met by Brinnin’s assistant, Liz Reitell, with whom he had started an affair on his third visit. Fatigue and drink exacerbated his condition. Doctors injected him with steroids, then morphine. He fell into a coma. Reitell called an ambulance, which took him to St Vincent’s Hospital. There he died without regaining consciousness.