A STREETCAR NAMED TENNESSEE

He could have been a character out of one of his own plays. His life was a constant circle of triumph, disenchantment and depression. He was a chronic abuser of drugs and a profound alcoholic. Yet, he wrote prolifically, breathing life into such enduring characters as “Blanche DuBois” and “Stanley Kowalski” in his Pulitzer Prize winning play, A Streetcar Named Desire. He was Tennessee Williams, one the greatest American playwrights of the twentieth century.

He was born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Miss., on March 26, 1911, to Cornelius and Edwina Dakin Williams. His father was a stern man who worked as a traveling shoe salesman; his mother, by contrast, was a prim, sophisticated, and often neurotic daughter of an Episcopal minister who doted over him and filled him with her conservative and moral teachings. The family moved from Columbus to Clarksdale, Miss., when Williams was three, and they lived there with his mother’s family until he was seven. He idolized his grandparents, especially his minister grandfather. But he was closest to his older sister Rose—a slim, frail girl diagnosed with schizophrenia, whose delicate and turbulent emotional state resulted in her to being institutionalized most of her life. It was an otherwise secure existence, punctuated only by evenings when his father would come home intoxicated and abusive after drinking too much at a local watering hole. Despite this, Williams later described his Mississippi years in his memoir as carefree, happy, and filled with a sense of belonging and freedom.

In 1918, Cornelius suddenly moved the family to the urban caldron of St. Louis, Mo., where he took a job with the International Shoe Company. They lived in a cramped, noisy apartment far removed from the pastoral and socially prominent lifestyle of Mississippi. Tennessee Williams remembered his St. Louis years as his worst, “because I found life was unsatisfactory.” It was here that he began to look inward for his own consolation. To make matters worse he contracted diphtheria, and he spent several years recovering, unable to accomplish anything at all.

Meanwhile, his mother presented him with a typewriter and encouraged him to do something with it. With time on his hands, he turned to writing. His first brush with literary fame came at age 16, when he won third prize and received $5 for an essay, “Can a Good Wife Be a Good Sport?” in Smart Set Magazine. The following year he published “The Vengeance of Nitocris” in Weird Tales. Finally, in 1929, he entered the University of Missouri, where he became a member of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity. It was here that his fraternity brothers dubbed him “Tennessee” because of his thick Southern accent and his father’s Tennessee background.

That autumn of 1929, the Depression hit the country and he was forced to leave school for financial reasons. Life quickly degenerated into a harsh practice of clawing and scratching for his very existence. He finally landed a job at the same shoe company where his father worked, which afforded him an income and time to write. A year later, he quit and enrolled in the University of Iowa, graduating with a bachelor’s in English in 1938. His first publicly performed play was Cairo! Shanghai! Bombay! produced in Memphis while he was still a student. This was quickly followed by Candles In the Sun (1936) and The Fugitive Kind (1937).

Williams became a prolific writer. By the time America entered World War II, he had written and produced 16 plays in only six years—an amazing feat considering how difficult it was for any unknown playwright in that era to get produced. But this did nothing to bring him the kind of professional recognition he wanted or the financial security he needed. He continued to live in virtual poverty and work odd jobs where he could find them. Eventually, relief came in the form of a job offer to write screenplays for MGM in Hollywood.

He headed west. He wrote what he called “celluloid brassieres” for Lana Turner, but the MGM job finally gave him a marked degree of financial security and afforded him the time to work on his own projects. Since the mid-1930s, he had been working on The Glass Menagerie, and by 1943 it was finished. He wrote a screenplay version of it and offered it to MGM, calling it The Gentleman Callers, but the studio felt it was too experimental and they turned it down. What MGM called experimental was a new approach to dramatic storytelling that Williams had developed – an approach in which the emphasis on-stage was more on the representation of reality rather than the presentation of reality itself. He experimented with fluid structures, productions devoid of large sets, stiff dialog, and complicated movements. Tennessee Williams was reinventing the American theater.

While at MGM, he received tragic news about his sister Rose. After years of treatment in mental hospitals, her parents eventually consented to a prefrontal lobotomy in an attempt to cure her. The operation was a failure, and Rose was incapacitated for the rest of her life. Williams never forgave his parents, and he blamed himself the rest of his life for not doing more to protect her. This incident and the guilt he felt may have been what drove him down the road to eventual drug abuse and alcoholism. Certainly, we see the character of Rose appearing more frequently in his works after 1942. “Laura Wingfield” in The Glass Menagerie is modeled after Rose, as is the character of “Blanche DuBois” in A Streetcar Named Desire.

The Glass Menagerie finally premiered at Chicago’s Civic Theater on Dec. 26, 1944. It had a very successful run and won him wide critical acclaim. Overnight, Williams became hot property. A year later, the play premiered at the Playhouse Theater on Broadway to even greater success, winning him more critical awards as well as a lucrative film contract.

Following the critical acclaim of The Glass Menagerie, Williams continued to write some of America’s best-known dramas; among them: Night of the Iguana, Summer and Smoke, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and Camino Real. His reputation continued to soar, particularly after receiving the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for A Streetcar Named Desire. He was finally achieving the level of success and fame few American playwrights had ever achieved before, and even fewer have achieved since.

But as his critical success and financial prosperity increased, he continued to be dogged by crippling self-doubt and emotional conflicts. He wrestled constantly with depression and he was forever obsessed by the notion that he would go insane like his sister Rose. “My emotionalism is much too great for my intellectual capacity,” he wrote in a letter to friend Audrey Wood. “It is like having sixteen cylinders in a jalopy...I don’t believe anyone ever suspects how completely unsure I am of my work and myself.’

In 1947, Williams met Frank Merlo, an Italian American who had served in the Navy in World War II. Merlo became Williams’ secretary, and later—his companion for life. Merlo served as a stabilizing influence for Williams just as the chaotic forces of his newfound fame and fortune were threatening to overwhelm his fragile emotional world. A testament to their deep devotion to each other may be found in Williams’ 1948 play The Rose Tattoo—a romantic comedy he wrote for Merlo about love in the life of Italian immigrants: it is the only play Williams ever wrote that had a happy ending.

When Merlo died of lung cancer in 1963, it sent Williams tumbling into an downward emotional spiral from which he never recovered. To make matters worse, his plays were met with increasing indifference or benign rejection. The same Broadway that had lionized him decades earlier was now hostile to him, giving him short runs and bad reviews or attacking his homosexual orientation in veiled language written into criticism of his plays. To combat his “blue devils of depression,” he turned to ever-increasing quantities of prescription drugs and alcohol, to which he became hopelessly addicted. His last years were spent a disillusioned man, with only memories of better days, prescription drugs and alcohol to keep him company.

When the end came for Tennessee Williams on Feb. 24, 1983, it was as bizarre as anything he could have written in any of his plays. While staying at the Hotel Elysee in New York City, amid a roomful of half-empty wine bottles and prescription pills, he accidentally swallowed the cap off a bottle of barbiturates and choked to death. He was one month short of his 72nd birthday.

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