In the late autumn of 1939, during a period of confinement to the attic of the family residence in a suburb of St. Louis, I received a wire from Miss Luise M. Sillcox, executive secretary of the Dramatists Guild at that time, and a phone call from Audrey Wood informing me that I was the recipient of a thousand-dollar grant, on which the ladies urged me to catch the first Greyhound to the city of New York, where the action was in those days, and possibly still is.
When this bit of information first came through, it was my mother, the indomitable Mrs. Edwina (Cornelius C.) Williams, who received it. She practically collapsed. I think it was the first time that I saw her in tears and it was a very startling sight and one which still touches me deeply, that sight and her outcry: “Oh, Tom, I’m so happy!”
Of course I was just as happy as she was but for some reason a piece of good fortune has never moved me to tears, nor has a piece of bad fortune, for that matter. I only cry at sentimental movies which are usually bad ones.
St. Louis is not a large part of the world and yet the fact that the Rockefellers had invested a thousand dollars in my talent as a writer, which lacked a great deal in the way of substantial evidence at that time and probably for some time thereafter, was a matter of considerable local interest. All three of the St. Louis newspapers invited me to their offices for interviews on the subject of this grant.
Now we hadn’t always been so favorably noticed in the cold city of St. Louis; in fact my sister Rose and I had been quite lonely there during our childhood and adolescence. Also, although my father had early on acquired a sort of underground reputation as a fairly big wheel in the International Shoe Company, he had suffered a remarkable misadventure during an all-night poker party at the Hotel Jefferson not long before the Rockefellers noticed me, and this misadventure had not been openly publicized but there had been a good deal of gossip about it. Somebody in the poker game had called Dad a “son of a bitch” and my father, being of legitimate and distinguished lineage in East Tennessee, had knocked the bastard down and the bastard had scrambled back up and had bit off my father’s ear, or at least he had bit off most of the external part of it, and “C.C.” had been hospitalized for plastic surgery. Cartilage was removed from his ribs and skin from his behind and the bitten-off portion of his ear was not exactly restored but rather ineptly approximated. The gossip concerning this incident had given the family a certain notoriety in St. Louis and the county, which rubbed off on me when I got this grant from the Rockefellers, and I think it is fairly safe to say that there has been public and private interest in the ups and downs of our fortunes ever since …
On Sunday I had lunch with the “great” Russian poet Yevtushenko. He came to me at “The Victorian Suite” about an hour late and was accompanied by a very fat, silent man whom he said he brought along as interpreter—which seemed extraordinary since he has full command of English.
He had gone as my guest, the evening before, to see my play Small Craft Warnings and he immediately launched an attack upon the play.
“You put only about thirty per cent of your talent into it, and that’s not just my opinion but that of people seated around me.”
I was distressed but I kept my composure.
“I’m very happy to know,” I said, with the cool of a Southern lady, “that I still have so much of my talent left”
He went on and on, he’s a very voluble as well as personable young man, till it was past closing time at the restaurant in my hotel.
I don’t know whether it was he or I who suggested that we go to the Plaza, which is in walking distance.
He told me, as we arrived and were seated in the Oak Room, that he was a connoisseur of wines. He proved it immediately by summoning the wine steward with that arrogance that characterizes his behavior in the States. He ordered two bottles of Château Lafite-Rothschild (they are about eighty bucks a bottle at the Plaza), and then a supplementary bottle of Margaux. Then he called over the Captain to place his order for lunch. He wanted (and got) a great bowl of beluga caviar with its appropriate trimmings, the best pâté and the most expensive steaks for himself and his equally voracious “interpreter.”
I was now a bit put out. I called him a “capitalist pig”—the remark applied with a veneer of humor. Then I launched a counterassault.
“Being a homosexual,” I told him, “I am very concerned over your [Russia’s] treatment of my kind in your country.”
“Absolute nonsense. In Russia we have no homosexual problem.”
“Oh, is that so! How about, say, Diaghilev, Nijinsky or some of the other artists who have left the Soviet Union to avoid imprisonment for being one of my kind?”
“We have absolutely no homosexual problem,” he still insisted.
The wine was excellent, of course, and our humors improved under its influence. He told me that I was a millionaire in Russia from the accrued royalties of my plays there and that I should come over and live off them like a king.
I said, “Be that as it may, I’d rather stay out of Russia.”
The lunch continued till closing time in the Oak Room and then came the bill and it was so big it required three pages for itemization …
He presented me with his most recent collection of verse, inscribing it to me with great flourish and expression of esteem and affection.
During our controversy over whether there was, or was not, any homosexual problem in the Soviet Union, I said to him, “I hope you don’t think I’ve brought the subject up because I plan to seduce you.”
I believe he thinks I’m quite mad, and I believe I have the same opinion of him, as well as “esteem and affection.”
After the local fanfare over the Rockefeller grant, I left St. Louis to come to New York, and arrived in New York City by Greyhound at daybreak. I had not rested or shaved, and looked pretty disreputable when I presented myself at the imposing offices of Liebling-Wood, Inc., way, way up in the RCA Building at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
The reception room was full of girls seeking chorus jobs in a musical that Mr. Liebling, husband of my new agent, Audrey Wood, was casting; they were milling about, chattering like birds on a locoweed high, when Mr. Liebling came charging out of his inner sanctum and shouted, “Okay, girls, line up now!” and everybody lined up except me. I remained on a chair in a corner. A number of girls were selected for auditions, the others gently discouraged, and they rushed chattering off. Then Liebling noticed me and he said, “Nothing for you today.”
I said, “I don’t want anything today except to meet Miss Wood.”
And dead on that cue she entered the outer office, a very small and dainty woman with red hair, a porcelain complexion and a look of cool perspicacity in her eyes which remains there today.
I figured that this was the lady I’d come to see and I was not mistaken. I got up and introduced myself to her and she said, “Well, well, you’ve finally made it,” to which I replied, “Not yet.” I meant this not as a witticism but quite literally, and I was rather discountenanced by her frivolous peal of laughter.
2
I guess it hardly needs stating that I had been the victim of a particularly troubled adolescence. The troubles had started before adolescence: I think they were clearly rooted in childhood.
My first eight years of childhood in Mississippi were the most joyously innocent of my life, due to the beneficent homelife provided by my beloved Dakin grandparents, with whom we lived. And to the wild and sweet half-imaginary world in which my sister and our beautiful black nurse Ozzie existed, separate, almost invisible to anyone but our little cabalistic circle of three.
That world, that charmed time, ended with the abrupt transference of the family to St. Louis. This move was preceded, for me, by an illness diagnosed by a small Mississippi town doctor as diphtheria with complications. It lasted a year, was nearly fatal, and changed my nature as drastically as it did my physical health. Prior to it, I had been a little boy with a robust, aggressive, almost bullying nature. During the illness, I learn
ed to play, alone, games of my own invention.
Of these games I recall vividly one that I played with cards. It was not solitaire. I had already read The Iliad and I turned the black and red cards into two opposite armies battling for Troy. The royalty, the face cards of both Greeks and Trojans, were the kings, princes and heroes; the cards merely numbered were the common soldiers. They would battle in this fashion: I would slap a red and black card together and the one that fell upon the bedspread face up was the victor. By ignoring history, the fate of Troy was decided solely by these little tournaments of the cards.
During this period of illness and solitary games, my mother’s overly solicitous attention planted in me the makings of a sissy, much to my father’s discontent. I was becoming a decided hybrid, different from the family line of frontiersmen-heroes of east Tennessee.
My father’s lineage had been an illustrious one, now gone a bit to seed, at least in prominence. He was directly descended from Tennessee’s first senator, John Williams, hero of King’s Mountain; from the brother Valentine of Tennessee’s first Governor John (Nollichucky Jack) Sevier; and from Thomas Lanier Williams I, the first Chancellor of the Western Territory (as Tennessee was called before it became a state). According to published genealogies, the Seviers could be traced back to the little kingdom of Navarre, where one of them had been a ward of the Bourbon monarch. The family then became divided along religious lines: between Roman Catholics and Huguenots. The Catholics remained Xaviers; the Huguenots changed their name to Sevier when they fled to England at the time of St. Bartholomew’s Massacre. St. Francis Xavier, credited with the conversion of many Chinese—a valiant but Quixotic undertaking, in my opinion—is the family’s nearest claim to world reknown.
My paternal grandfather, Thomas Lanier Williams II, proceeded to squander both his own and his wife’s fortunes on luckless campaigns for the governorship of Tennessee.
Now the imposing old Williams residence in Knoxville has been turned into a black orphanage—a good ending for it.
The question I’m asked with most tedious frequency by interviewers and talk-show hosts is “How did you get the name Tennessee when you were born in Mississippi?” So that’s the justification for my professional monicker—and I’ve also just indulged myself in the Southern weakness for climbing a family tree.
My father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, grew up mostly without the emolient influence of a mother, as the beautiful Isabel Coffin Williams died of TB at the age of twenty-eight. Consequently he had a rough and tough character. It was not softened at the military academy of Bellbuckle, where he spent much of his time in the guardhouse for infractions of rules; there he was fed only turnips, a vegetable which he never permitted to appear on our family table. After a year or two studying law at the University of Tennessee, he became a second lieutenant during the Spanish-American War, caught typhoid fever, and lost all his hair. Mother claims that he remained good-looking till he took to drink. I never saw him during his time of abstention and good looks.
But heavy drinking was not a detriment to a Mississippi drummer. After a short career in the telephone business, he became a shoe salesman and was very popular and successful at this itinerant profession, during which he acquired a great taste for poker and for light ladies—which was another source of distress to my mother.
He was such a good salesman that he was taken off the road to become sales manager of a branch of the International Shoe Company in St. Louis—a promotion which took us to St. Louis where the wholesale shoe company’s main offices were located, and which also removed my father from the freedom and wildness on which his happiness depended.
Dad went to St. Louis before Mother, Rose and I.
He met us at Union Station. We had scarcely left that curiously designed structure of gray stone, now threatened with demolition, when we happened to pass an outdoor fruit stand. In passing it, I reached out and plucked a grape. Dad delivered a stinging slap to my hand and boomed out, “Never let me catch you stealing again!”
A catalogue of the unattractive aspects of his personality would be fairly extensive, but towering above them were, I think, two great virtues which I hope are hereditary: total honesty and total truth, as he saw it, in his dealings with others.
Our first home in St. Louis was on Westminster Place, a pleasant residential street lined with great trees which made it almost Southern in appearance. Rose and I made friends and we had an agreeable children’s life among them, playing “hide-and-seek” and “fly, sheep, fly,” and bathing under garden hoses in the hot summer. We were only a block from the Lorelei swimming pool and the West End Lyric movie and we had bicycle races about the block. Rose’s closest friend was a pretty child whose mother was a snob who made catty remarks about Mother and Dad in front of us. I recall her once saying, “Mrs. Williams always walks down the street like she was on the boardwalk at Atlantic City and Mr. Williams struts like the Prince of Wales.”
I don’t know why we left Westminster Place for 5 South Taylor; perhaps the apartment on South Taylor admitted more sunlight (my mother was recuperating from “a spot on her lungs”). Anyway, it was a radical step down in the social scale, a thing we’d never had to consider in Mississippi; and all our former friends dropped us completely—St. Louis being a place where location of residence was of prime importance. That, and going to a private school and belonging to the St. Louis Country Club or one of nearly corresponding prestige; attending Mahler’s dancing classes and having the right sort of car.
So we had to make new friends.
I took up almost immediately with a rowdy little fellow named Albert Bedinger, he was as prankish as the Katzenjammer kids. I remember only a few of these pranks: throwing a rock at a window of a house which contained a retarded child, and sticking Limburger cheese in the radiator cap of a parked car. Then there was Guy Shaw, a tough little redheaded Mick who delighted in pushing me into the gutter, an affectionate kind of teasing which I did not appreciate at all. All free afternoons were spent, at first, with Albert, participating joyfully in his pranks. I was truly devoted to him and he to me. Then all at once Mother delivered one of her edicts. Albert was a terrible influence on me and I must never see him again.
Mrs. Bedinger was outraged and I remember her coming to see Mother about it.
“My son,” she declared, “is a red-blooded American boy.” Then she cast a frowning glance upon me, which clearly implied that I was quite the opposite.
I made one or two pathetic attempts to resume friendship with Albert on the sly, but Mrs. Bedinger treated me icily when I slipped over there and Albert was indifferent
The malign exercise of snobbery in “middle American” life was an utterly new experience to Rose and to me and I think its sudden and harsh discovery had a very traumatic effect on our lives. It had never occurred to us that material disadvantages could cut us off from friends. It was about this time, age eleven or twelve, that I started writing stories—it was a compensation, perhaps …
But now for my first meeting with Hazel.
The Kramers lived around the corner from us on the one attractive street in the neighborhood, a street entirely of residences with a tree-planted park running down the center of it, a street called Forest Park Boulevard.
One afternoon I heard a child screaming in the alley back of this street. Some young hoods were, for some unknown reason, throwing rocks at a plump little girl. I went to her defense; we took flight into her house and all the way up to the attic. Thus began my closest childhood friendship which ripened into a romantic attachment
I was then eleven, Hazel was nine. We started spending every afternoon in her attic. Being imaginative children, we invented many games, but the chief diversion that I recall was illustrating stories that we made up. Hazel drew better than I and I made up better stories.
Old Mrs. Kramer, Hazel’s grandmother, maintained a pretty active and prominent place in the social world of St. Louis. She belonged to the Woman’s Club, she drove a glossy
new “electric,” she bore herself with great style.
Mother was relieved, at first, that I was with Hazel, not Albert Bedinger or the other rough boys of Laclede and South Taylor.
Hazel was a redhead with great liquid brown eyes and a skin of pearly translucence. She had extraordinary beautiful legs and her breasts developed early: she was inclined toward plumpness, like her mother (who was sort of a butterball) but she had a good deal of height. In fact, when I was sixteen and Hazel fourteen, she had already outdistanced me in stature and had begun her habit of crouching over a little when she walked alongside me in public lest I be embarrassed by the disparity in our heights.
I suppose that I can honestly say, despite the homosexual loves which began years later, that she was the great extrafamilial love of my life.
My mother did not approve of my attachment to Hazel, as it developed, nor for that matter had Miss Edwina ever seemed to want me to have any friends. The boys were too rough for her delicate son, Tom, and the girls were, of course, too “common.”
This also applied, I’m afraid, to Miss Edwina’s attitude toward my sister’s friendships and little romances. And in Rose’s case, they applied with more tragic consequences.
Miss Edwina disapproved more of Hazel’s mother, Miss Florence, than of Hazel. Miss Florence covered up her desperation at home by a great animation and gusto of manner when she was out. She played the piano by ear with great skill and considerable volume and she had an excellent and lusty singing voice. Whenever she entered our apartment, she would seat herself at our upright piano and go into some popular song hit of the day, which was naturally quite unpopular with Miss Edwina.
Of course Miss Edwina’s put-downs of the grass widow were politely phrased.
“Miss Florence, I’m afraid that you forget we have neighbors and Mrs. Ebbs upstairs sometimes complains when Cornelius raises his voice.”