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Follies of God Page 29


  “ ‘We have our limits,’ she always told me. ‘We run against and away from the limits.’ But the limbs don’t always work, and to get the mind working, I need liquor and pills and powders and help from the saints and the legends who lived before us. What should I do?

  “As she did in Manhattan in 1969, Anne Sexton tells me—and a slumbering Bill Inge—the same things in that timeless dream: ‘I don’t believe in looking so high. There’s nothing up or out there that can help us. We’re earthbound now, and there is help right here, right now. Not for me, but for you.’ ”

  “I LOOK BACK NOW,” Tenn said, “and I remember that on that bed, in that cold, dark room, Bill and I were both men—queer men—who spent our lives creating the perfect woman—or perfect women—who would make us whole and happy and operational. This is true in both our work as writers and as men.” What the two men kept seeing in imagined reflections on the ceiling, what the dropped memories revealed, were women—those kind women who had supported and inspired them all their lives. There was no hope in money or awards or production of a play, but a female friend, a soft shoulder, a kind voice, embraces Tenn called “the rescue in the dark night with a mother’s cool palm,” was what they most wanted. Tenn recalled nights in that room when he and Inge exchanged recipes for the ideal woman: If Edwina Williams could not give Tenn warmth and unconditional love, he would find it with Maureen Stapleton or Marian Seldes or Elizabeth Ashley; if he needed someone to champion his work without “daggers of doubt,” he would call on Stella Adler, Eva Le Gallienne. Inge replaced Maude Inge with Eileen Heckart and Barbara Baxley and Elizabeth Wilson—strong women who would fight off his bullies and keep him safe, get him back to work, tell him he was loved, a “good boy.” All through the night they added quarters and halves of certain women, until they might get the formula right.

  “The construction of the ideal woman, either from flesh or the fog, is what I do,” Tenn said, “and I came to see that it was also what Bill did.” Tenn realized, he confessed, that Inge had been—could have been—his soul mate, the male friend he felt he was never able to cultivate or endure.

  “Wisdom arriving late is particularly brutal,” Tenn told me.

  IN THE SUMMER of 1973, Tenn discovered again the joys and the benefits of cocaine, and he consumed a great deal of it as he tried to write and as he watched the televised hearings concerning the Watergate scandal and the presidency of Richard M. Nixon. “I was unable,” he told me, “to know what was real that summer of 1973. I kept confusing my play with the Watergate hearings, and conversations with friends with the testimonies of various pudgy men at that green, felt-covered table, with cocklike microphones sticking up in their faces. I came to believe that Mo Dean was the manifestation of Wallace Stevens’s emperor of ice cream, although she had whipped-cream hair, a sort of clitoral baked Alaska. I had dinner with Harold Clurman one night and could not tell if he was the man who had once directed my plays or Senator Sam Ervin. I kept asking Clurman questions about Watergate, about Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and he ultimately left, something for which I do not blame him at all.”

  It was during this time that both Barbara Baxley and Maureen Stapleton called Tenn to tell him that Bill Inge had entered a “terminal” phase. Inge was constantly drunk, seriously abusing pills. His sister, Helene, informed Tenn that there were hundreds of pills underneath her brother’s mattress. Tenn agreed to call his friend, in the hope of steering him off an obvious suicide course.

  “We talked for a long time,” Tenn told me. “I wasn’t as high as I usually was. I talked to him about writers who might help him, who might inspire him to find the God in his own typewriter. I quoted to him from Joan Didion, who had the lapidary toughness we both loved and could never accomplish. I would read sentences from Play It as It Lays and show him how marvelous they were. I would describe how the paragraphs were broken up, how the words looked against the page. I read to him—from books and from memory—Bill Goyen’s The House of Breath. I reminded him of the majesty and the mystery of Goyen’s people, of how surprised we could still be by ourselves and others.” Tenn attempted several other calls to Bill Inge, but he wouldn’t come to the phone. Tenn would speak to Helene, and he would hear Bill’s labored breathing in the background, listening on an extension, the inevitable click when he hung up, and he would wonder what Bill was up to. Regretting that he had destroyed Bill’s notes for a play, Tenn tried to re-create them. He imagined making them a gift to his friend, so he wrote, under the manic snowiness of cocaine, a fast version of what he had remembered.

  Tenn was unable to type fast enough: William Inge committed suicide on June 10, 1973, stumbling out to his garage, climbing into his immaculate and rarely used car, and turning on the engine. Inge had always been a nervous driver—his passengers never felt comfortable being in a car with him. His novel My Son Is a Splendid Driver held a title that was ironic to his friends.

  Tenn wondered if his friend found, in that car, at long last, the comfort and peace that he always believed a prepared and examined death would bring. “I wondered,” Tenn said, “if he thought of all the teasing he had endured, all the misunderstandings, all the gifts he had offered and that had gone begging for a loving recipient, and I hoped that he could let it all go, perfumed by carbon monoxide, falling into a deep and final sleep.” One of the notes Inge had made for his play had read: “My final comfortable place will be one in which my mind will contain no memories except of being held and hugged and pulled up and away from harm. Everything else will fall away.”

  Tenn returned to New York and to a writing table that contained two piles of pale judgment: typing paper and cocaine. He would write and snort in marathon sessions. On or near July 4th, friends became worried about him and called to see how he was doing. Maureen Stapleton tells me that his words flew from his mouth so quickly that she had no idea what he was saying. She urged him to lay off the drugs, drink some coffee, and watch some TV. “And I got my ass over there from wherever I was supposed to be,” she told me. “I did what we always did for each other: dropped everything and went to see about my crazy friend.” Stapleton fed him coffee and Chinese food “to soak up the poisons,” and they turned on the television. “It was a fucking double feature,” Stapleton told me. “Picnic, of course, which, because of the timing, made us cry like babies. I saw so much in that film that I had never seen and will never see again, and Tenn and I were basket cases.” The second film was The Music Man, and “it saved us. We could laugh and live again. That musical was a world that Bill Inge wanted to join, but didn’t really understand. Bill Inge’s Harold Hill would have been fucking his mother and wearing ladies’ panties, and the women of the town, led by Hermione Gingold, would have been eating schoolchildren. Tenn and I watched the movie knowing the underside of it, and it saved us.”

  Stapleton stayed the night, boiling coffee and throwing out cocaine. “The plumbing was paranoid and jumpy,” she quipped, “but Tenn began to calm down.” Stapleton got into bed with Tenn and they began, once again, to talk things out. At one point Tenn began to cry and Stapleton cradled him. Tenn was asking, over and over, “Who will take care of Tennessee now?” Tenn asked it repeatedly, and just as often Stapleton would reply, “Baby, I have no fucking idea, but I’m here now.”

  Tenn returned to his typewriter “occasionally visited by God,” and took breaks to watch the never-ending saga of Watergate. He was joined in the watching, via phone, by Carrie Nye and Kate Reid, who were filming Maxim Gorky’s Enemies in upstate New York, where they often refused to report to the set during good moments of testimony. At one point, while working on a poem that had come to him in a dream, he phoned Anne Sexton to read it to her.

  “She was polite but without praise,” Tenn told me. “She told me what was good about it, but that was only about a quarter of it. I told her I would throw it out and start over, even as it killed me to do so. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘but that’s being a poet. Gutting and sewing up and smiling through the shit.’ ”<
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  The Watergate hearings came to an end. Richard M. Nixon resigned the presidency in August of 1974. Gerald Ford assumed the presidency, assuring the citizenry that “our long national nightmare is over.” Tenn liked the quote and wrote it down, for the title of either a play or a poem or a short story. He thought he should call Sexton and ask her what she thought.

  On October 4, 1974, Anne Sexton put on her mother’s fur coat and walked out to her garage and got into her not-so-immaculate car and turned on the engine. Tenn liked to think that the mother’s coat smelled of Arpège or Norman Norell or Bellodgia, to soften the thick but welcoming smell of carbon monoxide. “I hope she felt that the coat was her mother’s arms,” Tenn told me. “I hope that, like Bill, she went with ease and a sense of peace.”

  Thinking of William Inge and Anne Sexton in New Orleans with me, Tenn came up with an idea for a poem. He dictated the following, in fits and starts, over several hours, to me:

  So tell me, if you can, if you will, is there peace?

  In the deep or the dark, wherever you ran,

  Is what we wanted and needed there? To own, sense, or lease?

  I would follow you—think of it—will if I can.

  Somewhere—in my memory, of course—is a noisy café, full of smoke and laughter

  And questions that find a reply—gifts that find a happy recipient.

  All of us sought answers in machines and medicines,

  Not trusting people or the God who had hastily created them,

  Who made them empty, if occasionally pretty and useful.

  We found comfort in beds that held no sex, in which nothing would be born

  But resentment. If we couldn’t be held in bed by a lover, we could be held by a story.

  I have a new story now, one I wish I could share with you, but you ran ahead of me

  As you often did. In my story there are tomorrows with no fear and typewriters that

  Are full of Gods and extra letters, to help us tell our side of things, to reach out and

  Fill up all these people we keep meeting and losing.

  I hope you’re full now, your stories complete and neatly typed and indexed with the

  endings you craved, wrapped in your mother’s arms or sitting by the sink,

  Heart and life expanding, the blood on the tiles innocent and pure, so unlike your thoughts.

  This café will have music soon, I think, and the instruments will always sound out the clearest

  notes, the purest tones. There is celebration in the air, for all that you did and all that you left behind. The sound is faint now, considerate for your slumber, your need for quiet, but the sound will grow, a party will begin, and you’ll join us, and you’ll be welcomed, and you will join the sound of the music with your voices.

  This is whatever it is. Notes. Thoughts. A poem.

  It is not, and never will be, a farewell.

  When Tenn had finished the poem, I asked him what I should do with it. He asked that I give it to Barbara Baxley, if and when I ever met her.

  Thirteen

  TENN WAS a different person after discussing Bill Inge: organized, focused, hurried. I would not know until many years later that he had returned to his hotel room and made a phone call, deep in the night, to Elia Kazan, to share some ideas about Camino Real, to score some points. Tenn was scratching at scabs, digging in what Kazan called “the dirt of that garden we had neglected so long ago.” Kazan had been critical of Tenn in that call, lamenting his wasting of time, the blurred thinking, the failure of faith, and he told his friend to leave him alone, to get back to work.

  Tenn handed me a small piece of paper on which was written: “Intention is the hard, straight line on which you should be walking. Let it lead you where it wants to.”

  I read the note, twice, and then looked to Tenn for an explanation. He then handed me several sheets of paper on which he had crafted a family tree of characters.

  The tree of characters was populated with the names of actresses we had already discussed, and whose names I had scribbled on the menu from our lunch that first day. In the middle of the tree, straddling it somewhat, I saw my name and Tenn’s. Mine was followed by a question mark.

  “I no longer know where this is going,” Tenn told me, and since the statement was made as he gestured toward the cluttered shopping bag, I wasn’t sure if he was referring to a particular project, our course of action, or his life as a writer.

  “I’m alone now,” he explained, and he soon made it clear that he meant in his current hotel room, which no longer housed the person, never named, with whom he had traveled to New Orleans. It was the first time I learned that during our discussions across the city, someone had sat, somewhere, waiting for his return; and since Tenn had arrived each morning with examples of writing or descriptions of calls made to various people at all hours, there could not have been much interaction or discussion between them. Nonetheless, Tenn described this person, a young man, a writer, as a distraction and a nuisance, who needed to “sort out his own things, in his own way—something I could say for both of us as well.”

  Our time together was now limited, Tenn explained. He had been writing all night, and he learned that his work could not continue with his given inventory. His mind seemed to him now to have grown smaller, poorly maintained. As people age and are moved to smaller, tighter, ignored spaces, one can find an armoire, a night table, a chair—emblems of the house they had once lived in fully, happily. These pieces of furniture, still beautiful, vintage and proud, stood next to the bedpan and the hospital bed and the plastic flowers from the inattentive front desk of the hospice in which they now sat. “This is my theater,” Tenn told me, savagely slapping his forehead. “It is dark and dusty and it is no longer in the beautiful building, but housed in some small, dark artery, dusty and ignored. But good pieces are still scattered about.” The good pieces were not chairs or desks but characters, women looking for a writer to help them out of their predicament, to give them voice, to get the fog rolling.

  One of the first pages to come out of Tenn’s shopping bag was an outline of sorts, jagged and fast, of a memoir he now hoped to write. Tenn had published his memoirs only a few years prior to our meeting. I had read them and we had hurriedly discussed them. It was not a book of which he was proud; it was an effort he had avoided, rushed through, skimmed over, and forgotten about. He had not been honest in the book, not fully, and he had not marshaled his talents and his thoughts toward its completion. “It was a project created to give me momentum,” he admitted, “to allow me to continue as a writer, to inject myself into the flow of things, to be noticed.” The book was full of anecdotes of what he had done and what he had thought, but he now wanted to write a book that would be, as his notes attested, “a document of the elements that made me write and made me want to share my thoughts and my fears with others. A testament to the people who led me to the act of writing and allowed me to complete it.”

  In the margins were references to the house at Coliseum and Constantinople, the balconies of Royal Street, the stage directions of Summer and Smoke, the days and nights spent with Lillian Gish and on the soft shoulders of streets high above Los Angeles. Tenn was, in his thoughts, in his words, and in his notes, continually circling the same locations, the same people, the same themes.

  “I’m drowning,” he confessed, “and I know that. I know there’s a reason that I keep returning to those memories, those points of departure, but I don’t know what it is. I can’t progress from the memories and the notes and the dreams, all of which give me hope and that intense warmth and brackish recognition that I know precede the truth of things.”

  Tenn paused for a moment, fingering the pages in the bag.

  “I’ve approached this terribly,” he told me. “Entirely inappropriate. I’ve wandered. I have not been truthful. I want to try another method, another project.”

  I did not understand what the new project would be, or the method needed to complete it. I did not as
k for clarification.

  The name that took the top position on the tree of characters, Tenn’s family of function, was that of Geraldine Page, an actress to whom Tenn had made numerous references, but who had always been pushed aside, saved for later, when time and energy might be more abundant. Page, like Tenn, had a history in Missouri, a state and a mind-set that both had escaped and that both reflected upon with the same mixture of humor and embarrassment.

  Born in a city called Kirksville in 1924, Page always quipped to Tenn that it was full of churches and crayons—that was her primary memory. Like another rustic yet supernal actress—Lois Smith—Page found her first outlet as an actress in a church, finding her greed for the attention and for more and more lines to learn in direct opposition to the humility and grace she was supposed to search and yearn for within the walls of what she called a “square and stark and solid” building. Thirteen years younger than Tenn, Page was the “little sister of the dramatic arts” to the older playwright, and if he didn’t always trust her opinions and her intentions off the stage (she could be niggardly with her affections and her opinions, and she burned off boring situations and people like an athlete burns off fat), Tenn never failed to ask her how things were operating on the stage, both with plays in which she starred and with those he would beg her to read. Page, in a fashion similar to that employed by Laurette Taylor in The Glass Menagerie, had an ability to shift the focus of a play toward its leading female character, and as with Taylor, this was not done in an attempt to garnish all of the attention or the acclaim. “She recognized that the women I had written into my plays, and which I had asked her to play, were the center of the play, the scaffolding of the building I had constructed,” Tenn told me. “So she always made sure that the intentions grew from her, radiated from her position.”