“drizzle puss self” seemed to evaporate. Although subsequent editions of
The Glass Menagerie
appended his famous 1947 essay, “The Catastrophe of Success,” which made a legend of the “spiritual dislocation” that accompanied his sudden good fortune, in the early months of his renown Williams was caught up in the rollicking velocity of his fame.
The playwright, who only a “few years earlier had confessed to his diary that he didn’t have enough money to eat, now dined cavalierly from room service. “Once I ordered a sirloin steak and a chocolate sundae, but everything was so cunningly disguised on the table that I mistook the chocolate sauce for gravy and poured it over the sirloin steak,” he recalled. He also bought himself $125 suit to match the deluxe company he was keeping: Eugene O’Neill; the actress Katharine Cornell, who wanted him to write a play for her; and the director and producer Guthrie McClintic, who promised to give him the names of well-connected people to look up on his spring trip to Mexico. The last time he was there, Williams told McClintic, “I nearly went crazy the first few days—from loneliness—and . . . got embroiled in situations from which I barely escaped with my life. So it would be lucky to have a few of the non-throat-cutting variety.” He got his introductions, and along with them the discovery that in the aristocracy of success there are no strangers. “I have met the following here,” he wrote to Audrey Wood from Mexico City, “Leonard Bernstein, Dolores Del Rio, Rosa Covarrubias, Norman Foster (now directing Mexican films), Romney Brent’s sister, Balanchine, Chavez and many lesser notables of the International Set (!) all of whom have invited me places.”
Just before the New Year, Williams moved back to the French Quarter of New Orleans, where he’d begun his artistic adventure in December 1938. Then, Tom Williams had signed himself into a rooming house on Rue Toulouse as “Tennessee Williams, Writer.” Now, his name needed no explanation. “About an hour after my arrival,” he wrote to Wood, “the hotel owner rushed out of his office and seized my hand and exclaimed: ‘Mr. Williams, this is indeed an honor! We saw your play in New York.’ ” Although he met with three reporters and gave a radio interview soon after his arrival, Williams promised Wood that in New Orleans he was going to have “no telephone and if necessary an assumed name.” He added, “I’m going to be a very serious, hard-working boy again—all else is vanity.” A month later, he wrote to Wood again: “I am switching back and forth between two long plays, the one about the sisters started in Chicago and one about a Spinster begun in New York. Right now I am doing more with the sisters, it is now set in New Orleans and is called ‘A Street-car Named Desire’—there is one by that title that runs close by my apartment, and proceeding in the other direction down the next street is one called ‘Cemeteries.’ In spite of this I am not really in a very morbid state of mind, as this might suggest.” Williams had surrendered to the flesh; his new plays dramatized this capitulation. The ensuing twenty-four-month period would be the most fecund of his writing life.
The year 1946, in particular, would be a watershed—one in which Williams first glimpsed both his greatness and his downfall. For most of the year, he had two productions on Broadway. A road company of
The Glass Menagerie
was crisscrossing America. His first book of short plays,
27 Wagons Full of Cotton: And Other One-Act Plays
, was in bookstores. He seemed finally to have achieved his heart’s desire. A certain confidence and expansiveness had seeped into his manner and his metabolism. “I was not a young man who would turn many heads on the street,” he said. But fame had invested him with a glamour that gave his small torso fresh allure; he was experiencing the refreshing rush of visibility. “I never put on
The Glass Menagerie
appended his famous 1947 essay, “The Catastrophe of Success,” which made a legend of the “spiritual dislocation” that accompanied his sudden good fortune, in the early months of his renown Williams was caught up in the rollicking velocity of his fame.
The playwright, who only a “few years earlier had confessed to his diary that he didn’t have enough money to eat, now dined cavalierly from room service. “Once I ordered a sirloin steak and a chocolate sundae, but everything was so cunningly disguised on the table that I mistook the chocolate sauce for gravy and poured it over the sirloin steak,” he recalled. He also bought himself $125 suit to match the deluxe company he was keeping: Eugene O’Neill; the actress Katharine Cornell, who wanted him to write a play for her; and the director and producer Guthrie McClintic, who promised to give him the names of well-connected people to look up on his spring trip to Mexico. The last time he was there, Williams told McClintic, “I nearly went crazy the first few days—from loneliness—and . . . got embroiled in situations from which I barely escaped with my life. So it would be lucky to have a few of the non-throat-cutting variety.” He got his introductions, and along with them the discovery that in the aristocracy of success there are no strangers. “I have met the following here,” he wrote to Audrey Wood from Mexico City, “Leonard Bernstein, Dolores Del Rio, Rosa Covarrubias, Norman Foster (now directing Mexican films), Romney Brent’s sister, Balanchine, Chavez and many lesser notables of the International Set (!) all of whom have invited me places.”
Just before the New Year, Williams moved back to the French Quarter of New Orleans, where he’d begun his artistic adventure in December 1938. Then, Tom Williams had signed himself into a rooming house on Rue Toulouse as “Tennessee Williams, Writer.” Now, his name needed no explanation. “About an hour after my arrival,” he wrote to Wood, “the hotel owner rushed out of his office and seized my hand and exclaimed: ‘Mr. Williams, this is indeed an honor! We saw your play in New York.’ ” Although he met with three reporters and gave a radio interview soon after his arrival, Williams promised Wood that in New Orleans he was going to have “no telephone and if necessary an assumed name.” He added, “I’m going to be a very serious, hard-working boy again—all else is vanity.” A month later, he wrote to Wood again: “I am switching back and forth between two long plays, the one about the sisters started in Chicago and one about a Spinster begun in New York. Right now I am doing more with the sisters, it is now set in New Orleans and is called ‘A Street-car Named Desire’—there is one by that title that runs close by my apartment, and proceeding in the other direction down the next street is one called ‘Cemeteries.’ In spite of this I am not really in a very morbid state of mind, as this might suggest.” Williams had surrendered to the flesh; his new plays dramatized this capitulation. The ensuing twenty-four-month period would be the most fecund of his writing life.
The year 1946, in particular, would be a watershed—one in which Williams first glimpsed both his greatness and his downfall. For most of the year, he had two productions on Broadway. A road company of
The Glass Menagerie
was crisscrossing America. His first book of short plays,
27 Wagons Full of Cotton: And Other One-Act Plays
, was in bookstores. He seemed finally to have achieved his heart’s desire. A certain confidence and expansiveness had seeped into his manner and his metabolism. “I was not a young man who would turn many heads on the street,” he said. But fame had invested him with a glamour that gave his small torso fresh allure; he was experiencing the refreshing rush of visibility. “I never put on
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