7

Tonight I have been announced as appearing in Small Craft Warnings with the replacement for Helena Carroll a very gifted actress named Peg Murray, whom Bill Hickey calls one of the best in the business, despite the fact that she is not well known outside the profession.

It will be exciting to see a gifted actress, after such short preparation, take over the demanding role of Leona and to see us all up there giving her our support, covering the almost inevitable “fluffs” as best we can, and loving her as actors must love each other on such critical occasions, if there is love in this world, and I think there is. I think there is love in this world and even in the profession of acting, love that may expire backstage but that I think, in the form of co-operation, is nearly always present on-stage when the play is imperiled by the performance, the opening one, of a new star who has not been allowed enough time and rehearsals to undertake her part.

It will be exciting and it may be beautiful, too.

I recall a letter from Brooks Atkinson when he retired as drama critic for the New York Times.

I was on the Coast and I wrote him: “I think it is time for me to retire, not you, Brooks.”

He wrote me back: “You must go on with your allusive work.” I am not sure that my work was, at that time, still allusive but there is no question that it should be and that the advice was warmly given and well intended.

Yesterday two events of importance: one personal, the other political and very, very public.

The personal event was dinner with Miss Rose and her increasingly irritable and irritating companion. To complete the party, I brought along a young friend, a gifted painter, model, and sometime actor.

Miss Nameless had decided to book us a table at Lüchow’s, the beautiful Bavarian-looking restaurant, half as old as time, and we were very nicely placed just under the bandstand. The band, in Bavarian or Tyrolean costume and not a one in the bunch that the costume was becoming to, started to play at 7 P.M., just fifteen minutes after our arrival.

What charmed me most was a skylight close to our table, through which I saw first dark going into a deep dusk as the dinner progressed—well, disintegrated is a better word for it, since Nameless had her Irish up and immediately started to put down my poor young friend—and how he controlled his temper with that Irish biddy, deep in her cups and mean as a rattler, I cannot comprehend. He must be at least half an angel.

Miss Nameless began to take on the “young” in general as a bunch of social parasites and leeches and degenerates.

She declared that the good old days had gone completely and there was no dignity or integrity left in the world.

My friend and I had agreed in advance that when this lady started to show her bitch-colors, we’d say, one of us to the other, that we had seen a robin today in Central Park, and wasn’t that strange for a robin to be around so late in summer.

Well, I can’t tell you how many times we had to make references to the late summer appearance of this robin and to other valentine aspects of Central Park in order to keep things bearably cool at the table.

But I’m afraid I lost my cool and I turned on Nameless and said, “Let’s face it, you have turned into a reactionary and I am a revolutionary.”

She then started talking about mongrels, meaning the young man and I. You see, she is completely Irish and she regards all persons not completely Irish as mongrels. And, alas, she has no Irish humor on this subject.

Of course, when the evening was over, I began to feel a bit sorry for Nameless. She is so tough in her loneliness, her spinsterhood, and her archaic “principles,” which are as hypocritical as “principles” of her vintage could possibly be.

The story of my sister Rose’s tragedy begins a few years before I commenced my three-year break from college to work for the Continental Shoemakers branch of the International Shoe Company.

I have mentioned that Rose suffered for several years from mysterious stomach trouble. She was several times hospitalized for this digestive trouble but no ulcer, no physical cause for the illness, could be determined. At last it was recommended that she have “an exploratory operation.”

Luckily our family doctor, a brilliant physician, intervened at this point and told my mother, much to her dismay, that it was his (quite accurate) opinion that Rose needed psychiatric attention, the mysterious digestive upset being due, he thought, to psychic or psychosomatic reasons that could be determined only through the course of analysis.

You can imagine how this struck Miss Edwina. I am afraid that dear Mother has at times seemed to me to have been a moderately controlled hysteric all her life—and in her family tree (on both sides of it, Dakins and Ottes) have been alarming incidences of mental and nervous breakdowns.

As a matter of fact, when Miss Edwina herself landed in the bin, sometime during the early fifties, and phoned me at St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, where I had gone for a brief much-needed vacation, she said, “Guess where I am?”

“Why, Mother, aren’t you at home?”

“No, son. A horrible mistake has been made. I have been put in a psychiatric ward. Please come at once and get me right out of here.”

I did come at once. She had a female psychiatrist on her case and I had a private consultation with this lady and this lady said, “Mr. Williams, you probably know or have suspected that your mother has been paranoiac all her life.”

She then told me that Mother was “thoroughly artificial and superficial.”

Well, I was rightly indignant, despite some grain of truth that might be in this callously worded diagnosis.

“Be that as it may, and I don’t think you’re a reliable authority on my mother’s character since you say she has refused to talk to you—I want her immediate release.”

I sprung Mother right away.

Well, now let’s get back to Miss Rose.

In her early twenties Rose was sent to Knoxville with a few inexpensive party dresses to “make her debut.” A formal debutante party had been planned by Aunt Belle (Mrs. William G. Brownlow), but the death of her husband’s mother, the senior Mrs. Brownlow, intervened and the debut was “informal.” A party was given at the Knoxville Country Club, for Rose’s informal presentation to society. Aunt Belle had to buy Rose quite a few more dresses during this debut season: even so the debut was not exactly a howling success. I think Miss Rose fell in love with a young man who did not altogether respond in kind; and Rose was never quite the same. A shadow had fallen over her that was to deepen steadily through the next four or five years.

When Rose returned from her Knoxville debut, I said, “How was your visit, Rose?”

She said, “Aunt Ella and Aunt Belle only like charming people and I’m not charming.”

An earlier summer, the summer of 1926, after we had all visited in Knoxville, we went on to the Appalachian Club, which Aunt Belle and Uncle Will belonged to. That summer I learned to swim in a clear mountain stream; it was Aunt Belle who taught me, in the pool of fabulously cool, clear water formed by the dam, which offered a sparkling waterfall over bone-white rocks. Aunt Belle tried to support me with a hand under my belly in the pool, and when I said to her, “Aunt Belle, I’d rather depend on myself,” she came out with this choice endorsement: “Oh, Tom, dear Tom, when you depend on yourself you’re depending on a broken reed.”

Actually she was speaking of herself and of her dependence on God. She had an internal goiter which inclined her to extravagance of speech and of course to too much consideration of God.

I am as much of an hysteric as Aunt Belle, you know, and as much as Blanche; a codicil to my will provides for the disposition of my body in this way. “Sewn up in a clean white sack and dropped over board, twelve hours north of Havana, so that my bones may rest not too far from those of Hart Crane …”

The Appalachian Club was full that summer of boys that I couldn’t keep my eyes off, as they lay sunning themselves on the rocks in the stream. And my aunt Belle bought me my first long pants, a pair of flannels, and she bought Rose more charming frocks.

We stayed in a little cottage. My brother Dakin had contracted a serious distemper on the way, probably from bad drinking water, and Grand, who was along, made him buttermilk in a churn since buttermilk was all that “Dinky” could eat.

Rose had beaux, she was beautiful in her colorful summer frocks, and every night we danced. It was the Charleston era. There were two sisters at the club and one of them, I remember, killed herself the next year over a disappointment in love.

I remember Rose and the two sisters and me walking along a narrow mountain road and some mountain boys went past us, chanting out, “F U C K.”

None of us commented on the occurrence. We continued our way without a sign of hearing the obscenity.

And I remember the afternoon when we walked from the Appalachian Club to Gatlinburg, which is now the annual meeting place of the Seviers. We were with two adolescent youths, devoted to each other but attentive to us. On the way there was a great thundershower and it drenched us.

The girls retired to change in one place and I went to change with the boys. And the boys stripped naked in front of me and I stayed in my wet clothes until they undressed me. Nothing happened of a scandalous nature, but their beauty is indelible in my prurient mind, and also their kindness to me.

One final recollection. One evening that summer, that wild jazz-age summer, we young people gathered in the cabin of a middle-aged lady who was afflicted with some terminal disease. She retired early but remained awake. And we young people began to talk about sex, the great big mystery that we were beginning to explore.

Our hostess, from her bedroom, called out to us. “You are all just children …”

And she said it so sweetly and lovingly that we shut up and soon dispersed and the great new mystery of love in our lives, I mean of adolescent sex in our lives, went with us.

It accompanied us away from the afflicted lady.

Rose was a popular girl in high school but only for a brief while. Her beauty was mainly in her expressive green-gray eyes and in her curly auburn hair. She was too narrow-shouldered and her state of anxiety when in male company inclined her to hunch them so they looked even narrower; this made her strong-featured, very Williams head seem too large for her thin, small-breasted body. She also, when she was on a date, would talk with an almost hysterical animation which few young men knew how to take.

The first real breakdown occurred shortly after I had suffered the heart attack that ended my career as a clerk-errand boy at the shoe company.

My first night back from St. Vincent’s, as I mentioned, Rose came walking like a somnambulist into my tiny bedroom and said, “We must all die together.”

I can assure you that the idea did not offer to me an irresistible appeal. Being now released at last from my three years as a clerk-typist at Continental, God damn it I was in no mood to consider group suicide with the family, not even at Rose’s suggestion—however appropriate the suggestion may have been.

For several days Rose was demented. One afternoon she put a kitchen knife in her purse and started to leave for her psychiatrist’s office with apparent intent of murder.

The knife was noticed by Mother and snatched away.

Then a day or so later this first onset of dementia praecox passed off and Rose was, at least on the surface, her usual (now very quiet) self again.

A few days later I departed for Memphis to recuperate at my grandparents’ little house on Snowden Avenue near Southwestern University in Memphis.

I think it was about this time that our wise old family doctor told Mother that Rose’s physical and mental health depended upon what struck Miss Edwina as a monstrous thing—an arranged, a sort of “therapeutic” marriage. Obviously old Doc Alexander had hit upon the true seat of Rose’s afflictions. She was a very normal—but highly sexed—girl who was tearing herself apart mentally and physically by those repressions imposed upon her by Miss Edwina’s monolithic Puritanism.

I may have inadvertently omitted a good deal of material about the unusually close relations between Rose and me. Some perceptive critic of the theatre made the observation that the true theme of my work is “incest.” My sister and I had a close relationship, quite unsullied by any carnal knowledge. As a matter of fact, we were rather shy of each other, physically, there was no casual physical intimacy of the sort that one observes among the Mediterranean people in their family relations. And yet our love was, and is, the deepest in our lives and was, perhaps, very pertinent to our withdrawal from extrafamilial attachments.

There were years when I was in the shoe company and summers when I was a student at the State University of Missouri when my sister and I spent nearly all our evenings together aside from those which I spent with Hazel.

What did we do those evenings, Rose and I? Well, we strolled about the business streets of University City. It was a sort of ritual with a pathos that I assure you was never caught in Menagerie nor in my story “Portrait of Girl in Glass,” on which Menagerie was based.

I think it was Delmar—that long, long street which probably began near the Mississippi River in downtown St. Louis and continued through University City and on out into the country—that Rose and I strolled along in the evenings. There was a root-beer stand at which we always stopped. Rose was inordinately fond of root-beer, especially on warm summer evenings. And before and after our root-beer stop, we would window-shop. Rose’s passion, as well as Blanche’s, was clothes. And all along that part of Delmar that cut through University City were little shops with lighted windows at night in which were displayed dresses and accessories for women. Rose did not have much of a wardrobe and so her window-shopping on Delmar was like a hungry child’s gazing through the window-fronts of restaurants. Her taste in clothes was excellent.

“How about that dress, Rose?”

“Oh no, that’s tacky. But this one here’s very nice.”

The evening excursions lasted about an hour and a half, and although, as I’ve noted, we had a physical shyness of each other, never even touching hands except when dancing together in the Enright apartment, I’d usually follow her into her bedroom when we came home, to continue our warmly desultory chats. I felt most at home in that room, which was furnished with the white ivory bedroom set that had been acquired with the family’s “furnished apartment” on Westminster Place when we first moved to St. Louis in 1918.

It was the only attractive room in the apartment—or did it seem so because it was my sister’s?

I have mentioned our dancing together.

Rose taught me to dance to the almost aboriginal standing (non-horned) Victrola that had been acquired in Mississippi and shipped to St. Louis at the time of the disastrous family move there.

Dad had subleased our first real residence in St. Louis, a very charming two-story Georgian house in the suburb of Clayton, only a block or two from Washington University. The street was Pershing, and across from our house was the home of Virginia Moore, a strikingly handsome poet of that time; she had a brother who took an interest in Miss Rose and dated her several times. I recall having gone about Clayton distributing political leaflets during that disastrous campaign of his. He lost the election and suddenly was confined in a sanitarium for a nervous breakdown. When he was released from the sanitarium, the poor man killed himself, and Miss Rose lost a beau.

That summer I showed my juvenile poems to Virginia Moore, and how very gracious she was in giving one of them tactful praise.

In the rented house on Pershing, Miss Rose’s mind again began to slip. Not violently but gradually.

I remember a drive in the county with young friends. We started, the young friends and I, to laugh at the outrageous behavior of an acquaintance who was losing his mind. Miss Rose turned very grave and stiff in the back seat of the car.

“You must never make fun of insanity,” she reproved us. “It’s worse than death.”

And that’s exactly what Mother said when informed that Miss Rose had dementia praecox. This was at a Catholic sanitarium on the outskirts of St. Louis, shortly before Rose was sent away to the State Asylum in 1937. It’s not very pleasant to look back on that year and to know that Rose knew she was going mad and to know, also, that I was not too kind to my sister. You see, for the first time in my life, I had become accepted by a group of young friends and my delighted relations with them preoccupied me to such an extent that I failed to properly observe the shadow falling on Rose. Little eccentricities had begun to appear in her behavior. She was now very quiet in the house and I think she was suffering from insomnia. She had the peculiar habit of setting a pitcher of ice-water outside her door, each night when she retired.

As I drifted away from my sister, during this period, she drew close to our little Boston terrier Jiggs. She was constantly holding and hugging him and now and then Miss Edwina would say:

“Rose, put Jiggs down, he wants to run about.”

Then there was the wild weekend Mother and Dad had gone to the Ozarks, I believe, and Rose and I were alone in the house on Pershing. That weekend I entertained my new group of young friends. One of them got very drunk—maybe all of them did—but this particular one got drunker than all of us put together and he went up on the landing, where the phone was, and began to make obscene phone calls to strangers.

When our parents returned from the Ozarks, Miss Rose told them of the wild party and the obscene phone calls and the drinking.

I was informed by Miss Edwina that no one of this group should ever again enter the house.

This was, for me, a crushing edict, since the group contained my first dear friend in St. Louis, the brilliantly talented and handsome poet, Clark Mills (McBurney).

After she had tattled on my wild party, during Dad’s and Mother’s holiday in the Ozarks, when I was told I could no longer entertain my first group of friends in the house—I went down the stairs as Rose was coming up them. We passed each other on the landing and I turned upon her like a wildcat and I hissed at her:

“I hate the sight of your ugly old face!”

Wordless, stricken, and crouching, she stood there motionless in a corner of the landing as I rushed on out of the house.

This is the cruelest thing I have done in my life, I suspect, and one for which I can never properly atone.

(How time does thread through this “thing,” and such a long span of it.)

Time is the flow, the continual show,

Go says the bird, and on we go.

From the above you can see why I never made much of a mark for myself as a poet.

Have I told you that at Washington University we had a little poetry club? It contained only three male members. The rest were girls, pretty, with families who owned elegant homes in the county.

The three male poets were, in order of talent, Clark Mills, William Jay Smith, and the author of these memoirs.

Of the pretty girls who provided lovely refreshments and décor, I remember only the name of Betty Chapin and the first name of another, the wealthiest, Louise, who took us all out in the family limousine to a ballet performance one night.

Bill Smith was the handsomest of us three boys and he has turned out to be a “poet of prominence,” now associated with the teaching of that unteachable art at Columbia University.

Clark’s talent burned very bright in those early years. He published a paperback book of verse called January Crossing, a collection of distinction, jeweled with fine images and a cultivated taste. He was also a French scholar who was later to receive a scholarship to the Sorbonne in Paris and to write a study of the French littérateur Jules Romains, whose work I couldn’t read in or out of French. I wish that Clark had devoted himself exclusively to his own work. Artists must be egocentric that way. But he may surely be excused for having written the best translation (in my unbiased opinion) of Rimbaud’s Bateau Ivre. His translation of the final verse of that greatest lyric by Rimbaud went something, but not exactly, like this:

Of Europe’s waters I want now only

the chill, muddy ditch,

where a child full of sorrow crouches at dusk

to release from his fingers a paper boat

as frail as a butterfly’s wing.

Only Clark paid any serious attention to my efforts at verse. His taste was impeccable but imposed very gently. When I didn’t indulge in sophomoric extravagance, he’d say, “I like this, Tom,” but when I wrote purple, he would say to me, “Tom, this is too facile.”

At dusk in the early sixties I was about to enter my Manhattan apartment on East Sixty-fifth when Clark Mills appeared like an apparition on the walk and stopped and greeted me. It was winter and in his dark coat he looked somberly academic. Either Frankie was dying or was already dead and I was unable to respond at all naturally and freely. All I could think was: “He must know I’ve turned queer.” The conversation was pitiably brief and embarrassed.

“Hello, Tom.”

“—Is that you, Clark?”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing now?”

He told me that he was connected, now, with Hunter College. He stayed there, with gentle patience, a few moments longer, but I was unable to say, “Clark, come in.” So then, a ghost of our youth, he nodded in the winter dusk and continued on his way.

I’m sure he understood.

Someday, probably, he will re-emerge as a poet from what has apparently been a long hibernation.

Bill Smith’s talent has matured along more or less methodical lines: I like it because I like Bill but it doesn’t thrill me, alas.

Returning to St. Louis and the thirties.

Rose had a “serious” St. Louis beau. He was a junior executive at International, a young man of very personable appearance, social grace and apparently of great and unscrupulous ambition. For a few months he was quite attentive to Rose. They dated, I think, several times a week, they were almost going “steady,” and Rose would tremble when the telephone rang, desperately hoping the call was for her and that it was from him.

This was while Dad’s position as sales manager of Friedman-Shelby branch of International was still, if not ascendant, at least one of apparent permanence and continued promise.

But Dad was playing fast and loose with his position. He was continually alarming the “establishment” and International by his weekend habits. Significantly, he had not been elected to the “Board of Executives,” despite the fact that he was the best and most popular sales manager of International, and the only one who delivered speeches. His speeches were eloquent—and pungent. He did not talk much about his success at oratory but I think it pleased him enormously. He got up there on the platform before the assembled salesmen much in the style of his political forebears running for high offices in East Tennessee.

“Now you boys and I all remember when we used to have to go around the corner and have a cigarette for breakfast …”

I mean like that—and they loved it.

But the scandal occurred—the episode at the all-night poker party at the Hotel Jefferson in which Dad lost an ear that had to be replaced by plastic surgery. This marked the beginning of the end for Dad’s possible ascendancy to “the Board” at International.

It also marked the end of Rose’s dates with her handsome and unscrupulously ambitious “beau,” who no longer was a potential husband.

Her heart broke, then, and it was after that that the mysterious stomach trouble began.

But you don’t know Miss Rose and you never will unless you come to know her through this “thing,” for Laura of Menagerie was like Miss Rose only in her inescapable “difference,” which that old female bobcat Amanda would not believe existed. And as I mentioned, you may know only a little bit more of her through “Portrait of a Girl in Glass.”

Nowadays is, indeed, lit by lightning, a plague has stricken the moths, and Blanche has been “put away” …

One evening Dad, seated gloomily in the little “sunroom” on Enright, called out to Rose, “Sister, come here, I want to discuss something with you.”

He told her that he was in danger of losing his job at International—this was after the ear incident—and that she must prepare herself for self-support.

Somehow or other—precisely how I don’t recall—she did obtain employment as receptionist at the office of some young dentists. The job lasted only one day and ended upon the most pathetic note. She had been unable to address envelopes properly, the young dentists had discharged her and she had fled weeping into the lavatory and locked herself in.

They called us at home and we had to go to the office to persuade her to leave her place of retreat.

Rose was removed in 1937 to the State Asylum in Farmington, Missouri. We went out to visit her.

“Tom, let me show you my ward.”

She conducted me through it: it was too awful to believe, all those narrow little cots and hard wooden benches. Under one of the benches was crouched a young girl in a catatonic condition.

“Rose! What’s wrong with her!”

(My God, what a question!)

With no apparent discomposure, Rose replied, smiling, “She’s on her bad behavior today, that’s all.”

Years later, about 1949 or 1950, Rose was living with an elderly couple on a farm near the asylum—having been so tragically becalmed by the prefrontal lobotomy, which was performed in the late thirties.

I arranged for her to come to Key West for a visit, accompanied by the farm-lady caretaker. Grandfather was with me.

He came rapidly stumbling out of the house as the car arrived.

“Rose, here is Grandfather!”

“No, no, no!” she cried out. “He’s an old impostor!”

The disastrous visit lasted for only four days and during this time she would eat nothing in the Key West house except a can of Campbell’s soup and one of chili, and only when the cans had been opened by me.

At this time Miss Rose was being afflicted by what she called “crime-beasts.” Whatever she touched that could be shaken, she shook to remove the “crime-beasts” from it. The house was under a terrible shadow despite the radiant weather of early spring in Key West. The adventure was abandoned: Rose and her cow-like companion returned to the Missouri farm …

At this time Miss Rose wrote letters almost daily.

I remember one that began with this phrase: “Today the sun came up like a five-dollar gold piece!”

She was devoted to the small children on the farm and especially to the canary and each of her childish little letters contained an account of how they were doing, such as “Chee-chee [the canary] seems happy today.”

“Today we drove in town and I purchased Palmolive shampoo for my crowning glory.”

Soon I had her removed to an expensive sanitarium called “Institute for Living” in Hartford, Connecticut. When I visited her there, a few months later, I was consternated and furious when I was informed that Miss Rose had been put into the violent ward. They told me that she had knocked an old lady down. I demanded to see Rose at once.

“I didn’t knock her down,” said Miss Rose—who never lies—“I just gave her a push and she fell. She kept coming into my room at night and I couldn’t sleep.”

I immediately told the administrator of this “Institute for Living” that Miss Rose was leaving.

We drove for hours and hours to Stoney Lodge in Ossining, where she now stays, a lovely retreat where she has a pleasant room to herself, with flowered wallpaper. The Lodge is on a bluff looking over the upper Hudson, and the grounds are beautifully landscaped.

This is probably the best thing I’ve done with my life, besides a few bits of work.

I gave Rose a parakeet, remembering her devotion to the canary at the farmhouse. It became a dear pet. Whenever I took her back to the Lodge after an outing, she would say to me, as she got out of the car, “Tom, don’t you want to come up and see my parakeet?”

It thrived for several years.

And then, one outing, Miss Rose seemed unusually troubled and when I got out of the car with her at the Lodge, she did not invite me to visit the little bird.

“Aren’t we going to see the parakeet, Rose?”

“No, not this time,” she says. “It isn’t very well.”

I insisted on going up to her room and the parakeet was lying dead in the bottom of the cage: the nurse in attendance at Rose’s Lodge said it had been dead for days but Miss Rose would not allow it to be removed.

On several occasions after this tragic demise, I tried to persuade her to accept another parakeet and she has always refused.

Rose has never and will never openly admit that a death has occurred. And yet she once said, “It rained last night. The dead came down with the rain.”

“You mean their voices?”

“Yes, of course, their voices.”

Whenever my friend Maria mentions Miss Rose in her letters, she refers to her lovely, heartbreaking eyes.

And yet, now, Maria refuses to accept my phone calls. The contradictions in one’s dearest friends appear to be quite limitless …

Or nearly.

I think the reason Maria is angry may be that my representative, Bill Barnes, rightly felt that we could no longer suspend a production of Out Cry until Paul Scofield found himself prepared to make a formal commitment and set a specific time for the production in England. With regret I acquiesced to this opinion, and in a short while the “property” was assigned to David Merrick. Peter Glenville was named as director.

Maria, the Lady St. Just, is a woman of intense loyalties. She felt that our friend “Chuck” Bowden had been betrayed and, being a romanticist, she could not understand the exigencies of signed and sealed commitments in the theatre.

No one has ever been more furious at my vacillations, timidity, and weakness than myself—with the exception of Maria. She has always felt that I betray myself with them, and so betray myself as an artist.

She suddenly stopped answering my letters. Then she became “not at home” to my transatlantic phone calls to Gerald Road, London, and to Wilbury.

I needn’t tell you how greatly distressed this makes me, since at this time Maria and my sister Rose and Billy are the only persons who are close and dear to my heart.

I am staying on in New York two or three more days, and then, having seen Peg Murray’s opening in Small Craft Warnings, I will leave for the newly furnished apartment in New Orleans. That is, unless Mother’s doctor tells me that her condition is terminal or critical to the point that I really will have to go to that dreaded city of St. Louis.

Whether or not I accompany Bill Barnes, at the end of August, to the Venice Film Festival depends on whether or not it will attract Maria as my guest on the Lido.

Otherwise I’ll stay in New Orleans for the good, long rest so much needed before the next production, of Out Cry, which I must believe will start rehearsals late next month.

On its opening night in New York, I will fly to Italy and remain indefinitely among those lovely people; hopefully finding the little farm I’ve long dreamed of buying, on which to raise geese and goats, to employ an attractive young gardener-chauffeur, and swim and swim.

Yesterday I was alarmed by a state of confusion at the New Theatre. Honest to God, I couldn’t tell the interval from the end of the first show. I mean I came out of the men’s dressing room when I heard the applause for the first act curtain. My “fluffs” were alarming, too. And if the back of the house had been filled—it wasn’t for either performance—I doubt that I would have been audible much of the time.

The problem seems to be breath. I let the end of a sentence fall because the breath runs out.

And yet I got good hands. I guess there is something about me that is recognizable as something about “Doc”—regardless of whether all that I say is heard.

It is imperative that the show complete the summer. It must, it will. I think the production of Out Cry may hinge upon my demonstration to draw again and to keep a show that received “mixed reviews” running for five months, which is, I mean would be, quite a prestigious accomplishment and a help with the big one.