Around December 1966, at age forty-eight, Smith was down and out. He drank a fifth of scotch and ate countless amphetamines every day. At this point, his live-in girlfriend of seven years, Carole Thomas, was loyal but growing weary. He maintained grand, alluring ambitions, but nobody would hire him for fear of igniting an impossible odyssey. The underworld jazz scene in the building had fizzled out two years earlier.
Nothing in particular was happening on this winter evening, but Smith rolled his tape recorder for seven hours anyway. He caught WBAI radio news stories on Vietnam, atomic bomb fears and backyard shelters, civil rights, and urban drug problems. There was a literary program on Hemingway in Cuba, something about Kafka, and a reading of a Katherine Anne Porter short story. Smith was walking around the loft wearing an eyeball-shaped crystal on a chain around his neck. The following bit of conversation was caught on tape:
Thomas: Where did you buy that perceptual eye? I want one.
Smith: From a gypsy. She was wearing it around her neck.
Thomas: Would you get me one?
Smith: I have to find a gypsy first. Actually, it was the eye of her daughter. It had a tear in it. It took a year and a half for her to build a tear. When she had an emotion, which wasn’t often, she would take this eye and she would squeeze it. And one tear would drop out, and because it was so rare, so precious in this callous little witch, it became like a precious stone, a jewel of a tear. And kings fought mighty battles and killed millions to gain this precious stone.
Thomas: Is this another one of your stories?
Smith: [Laughs.] Well, no. Let’s say I stole it from Tennessee Williams, his great play Camino Real, in which—in one of the most beautiful moments I’ve ever seen onstage—she, the gypsy’s daughter, kneels alone on the stage and suddenly she says, “Look, Mama, a tear.” And it seemed, beyond the whole idea of all existence, that somehow, she, the conniving rotten little mother-taught daughter, produced a real honest-to-goodness glittering tear. It was a very beautiful moment. As a matter of fact, I think someday somebody’s gonna revive that play and they’re going to learn that it’s one of the greatest plays of American theater. It certainly was one of the most exciting evenings that I ever spent in the theater.
That’s saying a lot. Smith spent many evenings in the theater, for fun and for work. In 1947, he followed Williams around and photographed the rehearsals and premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire for Life. He made an intimate portrait of Williams doing the backstroke in a pool at the New Orleans Athletic Club, apparently nude with an erection. He tape-recorded TV and radio performances of several Williams plays, including The Fugitive Kind, The Yellow Bird, and a 1960 performance of Camino Real. He even taped a 1960 Edward R. Murrow program featuring Williams and the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima in conversation. It was Williams’s blend of documentary naturalism, elements of fantasy, and his mix of tenderness and destruction, vitality and despair, that Smith tried to emulate in his photography.
Not many people, even theater professionals, have seen a production of Camino Real, not to mention a good one, and few feel as strongly about it as Smith did. He saw the play’s 1953 debut, directed by Elia Kazan, which was drubbed by critics. It hasn’t been revived on Broadway since 1970. A New Directions paperback of the script, with a powerful introduction by John Guare, reprints the original Playbill notes, in which Williams states the play “is not words on paper.” “Of all the works I have written,” he argues, “this one was meant most for the vulgarity of performance.”
In an effort to learn what Smith saw in Camino Real, I called Ethan Hawke, who played the play’s protagonist, Kilroy, in a revival at the Williamstown Theater Festival in 1999, a production mentioned in the theater world as the definitive treatment of that play. Hope Davis played the part of the gypsy’s daughter. Hawke was eager to discuss it:
I can see why Smith liked it. The play is almost impossible to get right—it’s a balancing act of tones—but it can be done. It can shatter people. In many interpretations of it, Kilroy has died of a fever, and the play is his dream before death, an imagined purgatory, a place where everything we thought was important (class, poetry, money, sex, politics, violence) is a crass joke. The place is hot and sweaty, and everything is dirty and dilapidated. Images are all that matters. They streak across the stage one after another, like a comet blazing across the atmosphere. It’s like T. S. Eliot wrapped in a vaudeville act. There is something terribly sophisticated happening simultaneously with something ridiculously sexy and silly. Imagine Prufrock in a strip club, with naked women wrapped around silver poles while drunk fat men claw at their wallets. The scene with Kilroy and the gypsy’s daughter is the most electric minutes I’ve ever spent onstage. Hope Davis was tremendous, like Judy Holliday with a streak of wisdom. The scene’s like a live sex show, with no clothes coming off, if a live sex show could make you laugh and cry. It’s a lightning bolt. I do not hyperbolize. It’s Tennessee at the full reach of his powers.
The way Hawke talks about Camino Real is not unlike the way I have talked about Smith and his loft over the years: feverish, dreamlike, hot, sweaty, dirty, dilapidated, sexy, silly, electric, comic, tragic, a balancing act of tones. The play is about derelicts, misfits, outcasts, and romantic dreamers who are struggling to avoid the street cleaners (literally) of the conventional, educated world. These are the same people that were hanging out in the Sixth Avenue loft. Some of them played piano, drums, or saxophone; others helped him organize his mess.
Camino Real is usually depicted as a flight of fantasy for Williams, a departure from the natural realism of Streetcar, The Glass Menagerie, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I called the Target Margin Theater’s artistic director, David Herskovits, to ask him about it. He’s studied the play for years, including correspondence between Williams and Kazan and their stage notes, and he’s produced and directed a one-act version, Ten Blocks on the Camino Real, and another play, The Really Big Once, based on the Williams-Kazan collaboration on the original. I don’t see Camino Real as a departure for Williams at all, Herskovits said. He was constantly experimenting. There is a poetic, dreamlike quality underneath the surface of everything he did, even pieces like Streetcar and Menagerie. It does buck the trends of its time, though. After the war the naturalistic methods swept the field of American theater for a while. Camino Real’s dramatic language is more musical than narrative. The image itself is eloquent. The image grabs your attention in an associative, unconsoled, and mysterious way, not a narrative way. That play influenced a lot of important people in 1953. I know Sidney Lumet saw it and was still talking about it a half century later.
In Camino Real, the mythical character of the poet Lord Byron makes an appearance and delivers a soliloquy in which he says, “For what is the heart but a sort of—a sort of—instrument—that translates noise into music, chaos into order—a mysterious order. That was my vocation once upon a time, before it was obscured by vulgar plaudits! Little by little it was lost among gondolas and palazzos!” Then he declares, “Make voyages! Attempt them! There’s nothing else.”