Writing about psychic phenomena was a no-go, Part II.
Rave told various versions of how she met Tennessee Williams. Sometimes she would say that a stained manuscript of “The Gentleman Caller” came up from Mexico and she discovered it while reading plays for Audrey Wood. Here she says it was “Summer and Smoke.” I am absolutely certain she knew Williams quite well (for one thing, she was in his letters, and his biographers would also seek her out), but the story did shift around a bit. This was written in 2007, when she was 91, so I looked past little inconsistencies. Oh, and please excuse some of the ____ spots. It means I couldn’t read her handwriting there.
I thought I’d left Hollywood for good, but wonder of wonders, almost all of Hollywood had discovered Sun Valley. Gary Cooper arrived one winter for skiing and came back for a summer of golf and tennis and hiking. Sun Valley has everything — gorgeous mountains, a beautiful lodge, bungalows, and some of the best food in the world. Their chefs came from Switzerland, and I hope that today, in the year 2007, everything is as great as it once was.
I kept in touch with Audrey and Tenn all the years in California and Idaho, and I was too sad when Tenn broke with Audrey and went to another agent. Audrey, he told me, had criticized a play he considered one of his finest, and when she suggested he make serious changes, he said he hit out at her, banged on her desk, tossed his cigarette out her office window and stormed out the front door. Tenn, ever after, cut all ties with Audrey and never really rose as far as he might have gone.
“You bit the hand that fed you,” I told him. “That’s bad luck.”
I was worried about his drinking, too, and the company he kept. But he was a stubborn guy and never patched it up with Audrey. She walked around with a broken heart ever after. And Tenn? Well, I watched his decline. Once in a while he’d write a box office hit, but not too many, and then he began to write really awful ones and put his own money up front in order to get a short-lived production. And his eyes were failing and he was side-lined for months having one operation after another.
We lived next door to each other in NYC and would pub-crawl together (me hugging a glass of ginger ale) and Tenn getting drunker and drunker. He lost too many good friends in high places through alcohol, and the end was not good. He lived in Italy and wanted to live the rest of his life there, but his doctors told him to stay close to NYC, or at least America, because of the wonderful doctors he had.
He bought a small house in Key West and would swim every day in his pool. Hollywood called almost once a week to come back and write screenplays for Lassie the Dog, but he loathed Hollywood and wouldn’t reply to their pleas. I liked “Iguana” — he sold it to Hollywood and the movie, with Ava Gardner, was really good. His poetry was perfect, I thought, and I liked his short stories. But “Streetcar” is still the stand-out. I’m glad he had great success — he wanted it so much and I often think that suicide would have entered the picture if he hadn’t been blessed with success.
Tenn was terribly shy. It took months for him to speak to me — and we saw each other every day — in Audrey’s office when “Glass Menagerie” was in rehearsal. I didn’t exist for him until one day Audrey said, “You look straight through Rave. What’s the matter with you?”
And Tenn hung his head and said “I’m terrified of the fact that she’s the best play reader in New York City.”
“Be glad she is,” Audrey said, “for she’s the reader who told me to take you on. And all because she read ‘Summer and Smoke’ and loved it.”
From then on, Tenn was my puppy dog. He followed me around California — I had a new car the year he was out there — and he’d let me drive him around Beverly Hills and point out all the movie stars’ houses. He was terrified of driving or even being a passenger, so I slowed down to just 10 miles an hour, as we visited all the beauty of Beverly.
My high school, Beverly Hills High, wanted him to lecture there, but he was too shy. “All those 16-year-old kids staring at me!” he said. “I’d sink to the floor.”
I was always mailing letters to his sister Rose, for he was devoted to her and wrote her at least three times a week. She was slightly [mentally disabled], but during her good days and weeks he’d fly her up to NYC and take her to the movies, which she adored. He bought her TV sets and new dressers and sent her trip money (she loved to travel). He was a generous young man, soft-spoken, a gentleman. And I never heard him raise his voice or gossip about anyone. If he did or said anything negative in all those years, I never heard any of it.
He had loved a girl at college and they had an affair. He often spoke of her, but said “She’s better off without me.”
New York society women invited him to a great many of their elaborate parties, but he always wound up sitting alone in a corner, nursing a tall, iceless Scotch.
I made him buy tailor-made suits — he loathed standing still for fittings, but he had to admit they felt wonderful and he did look better. At the end of his life, he was dickering with some man about buying a house in Rome. This was his favorite city, and he would have moved there before, but his mother needed him — pleading to see him at least once a month. That was quite a drain on him, but he was dutiful and put up with all the family ____ like the good son he was.
He helped put his brother’s children through school, and bought lavish gifts for all his friends. His apartment on East 64th Street was a mess, and I offered to go over and straighten it up for him, but he said No!
He liked messes!
He had a favorite pub on the East Side of Manhattan (1st Avenue), and I was living at 57th Street and 1st Avenue, so we’d meet there and talk over old times and new times (he loathed the “new” times). He could recite poetry for hours. He liked Robert Frost and Blake. He loved going to London where all the “___” and society ladies gave lavish parties for him. And he had the loudest laugh in the world. I told him when he laughed, the native in Burma heard him. He loved the island people in the South Seas — said they calmed his nerves.
He thought he was ugly.
“You’re short,” I told him, “but you’re not ugly. You’re self-conscious,” I went on, “And I don’t think you’re ever going to change.”
I think it was a girl who told him his face turned her off, and of course that would upset any man.
Tenn loved dogs, but he traveled so much he had very few real pets. And when he did buy a dog it was usually a bull terrier, and I don’t like the breed, so gradually he did away with pets of all sorts — a parrot was in his living room in a cage for about a month. One day he got fed up with its squawking and gave it away.
He never really settled down, except in the little house in Key West. He had a lady who did the cooking and mending and fussing over him. But a real home and a wife and kiddies, never.
He liked being called “Tom,” but I always addressed him as Tenn, for that’s the way he ____ his letters to me, and to Audrey. Habits die hard.
Tenn died in 1983. His sister lived until 1996.
