An Angel to His Angst : Books: When Maria St. Just met Tennessee Williams, she became his friend, and muse. In publishing his letters, she hopes to show his compassionate side.

I’m alive. Maggie the Cat is alive. --From “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”

It was that indolent hour after supper. Noel Coward was playing piano softly in a corner, Maria St. Just was hiking up her dress, and this desolate-looking young man was sitting all by himself, looking as if he were quarantined on the couch. St. Just considered his peculiar attire, which terminated at his toes in one red sock and a mate in the unlikely hue of blue. Clearly, even though theater heavyweights the likes of Laurence Olivier were mingling mere steps away, the solitary rumpled figure couldn’t possibly have been anyone more humbling than an understudy. Someone, in fact, much like St. Just.

She barreled right up to him and offered him a drink.

“He was obviously very surprised at the interest and the gentleness with which I approached him, because I could see how terribly shy he was. When he spoke, he blushed,” St. Just recalls 42 years later. “And then he looked at me with these wonderful eyes. And he said, ‘Who brought you up?’ And I said, ‘My grandmother.’ He said, ‘My grandmother brought me up.’ ”

What difference did it make that the untidy gent was already the prince of Broadway, having triumphed with his piercing “The Glass Menagerie”? Tennessee Williams had always depended upon the kindness of strangers, so he was thrilled when St. Just, a dark young Russian actress, befriended him during that otherwise intimidating party at John Gielgud’s in London. Their click of recognition forged a fierce friendship that has only now emerged from the wings. And their intimacy lasted for nearly four decades, until death did them part, when the pill-dependent and still solitary Williams choked on a bottle cap in a New York hotel room in 1983.

St. Just shudders at the thought, and her booming voice drops to a halting whisper: “So terrible. All alone.”

Not any more. Williams’ most zealous ally--and chattiest muse--is back in sync with the man some call America’s greatest playwright. For St. Just is doing her damnedest to resurrect his once-tattered reputation, as well as his art. She has compiled his chatty, funny, angry and poignant letters in a just-published volume, “Five O’Clock Angel: Letters of Tennessee Williams to Maria St. Just, 1948-1982.” The critically hailed collection chronicles one of the very few relationships that was a constant in the playwright’s restless life, as well as an artistic inspiration for him. St. Just’s exuberance, her “wit and gallantry,” in the playwright’s words, gave birth to Williams’ deathless character Maggie the Cat.

St. Just’s first reaction to the news was impassioned. “Good heavens,” she whoops, “I was livid.

“We were sitting in his flat and he flung this play at me, and he said, ‘Oh, Maria, I’ve written a play about you.’ I was very pleased. He said, ‘Take it home and read it.’ He regretted it. I came back the next morning fit to be tied. I said, ‘This is absolutely ridiculous. I want to be a Tartar princess in a sleigh. With wolves.’ I wanted to be like a character from Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, you know. He said, ‘Oh, Maria, it’s your spirit, your tenacity, your life force.’ ”

St. Just’s stage counterpart hasn’t been doing too badly herself. Maggie the Cat is alive in the Broadway revival of Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” which has earned thunderous applause, a Tony nomination for the latest Cat--Kathleen Turner--and a Tony for Charles Durning as Big Daddy. St. Just had a hand in that as well; as co-executor of Williams’ estate--and one of the people who must give the nod to revivals--she has picked her shots carefully, approving only those productions that would do the playwright proud, and working closely with directors to communicate Williams’ intent.

All this comes on the heels of last year’s Broadway revival of Williams’ “Orpheus Descending,” which starred Vanessa Redgrave. And now St. Just is gearing up to turn his Key West home into a museum, as well as shepherd into publication his diaries (with his title, “Dead Planet the Moon, I Salute You”), not to mention six unpublished plays.

Maria takes credit for Maggie’s famous irritation with “no-neck monsters,” immortalizing a child who once had the dubious taste to splash St. Just in a pool. But Maria and Maggie have much more in common than that--they’re fighters. And, as fate would have it, 35 years after the Broadway curtain first went up on Maggie the Cat’s struggle to keep her homosexual husband, St. Just is battling for posterity’s good opinion of the gay playwright, her closest friend. “You couldn’t have another friend if you had him. You didn’t want another one,” St. Just says simply.

“She’s terrific, she really is,” says Williams’ other co-executor, John Eastman, the playwright’s New York attorney since the early ‘70s and Paul McCartney’s brother-in-law. “She cares a great deal. She’s very energetic. It’s a real passion with her.”

“What (Williams) admired most about Maria was her unswervable, desperate grip on what she valued in life,” director Elia Kazan wrote in the book’s preface. “It was what he admired in women, he would say, that they would fight with claws for what was essential for them as women and never be deflected.”

Maria the Cat is indeed alive. The recent Broadway successes are helping to salve the critical record on Williams, which flagged later in his life. What’s more, St. Just is counting on the letters, which show the playwright’s loyal, compassionate side, to correct the impression left by his trashy memoirs and interviews.

If they presented the aging Williams as a mercurial boozer, St. Just blames it all on, well, him.

“He gave the most awful interviews,” she says in her gunshot cadence. “He simply presented himself in the most impossible way most of the time. He was hurt and he was tired and he was fed up. I was always trying to shut him up. It was impossible. If I ever wrote my memoirs, they would be called, ‘Do Shut Up, Tennessee.’ ”

There is nothing but affection for Williams in that remark. The 60-ish St. Just--she won’t give her exact age--is bustling about her ample hotel suite, petite but powerful, her hair a swoop of ash blonde, white silks trailing. She has checked into the lush Beverly Hills Hotel because it was a favorite haunt of hers and Tennessee’s. The playwright is absent but somehow everywhere anyway.

He is present in the snippets of plays that pepper St. Just’s throaty speech. He even circles her fingers and wrists, in a brilliant ring of rubies and diamonds, a chunky gold bracelet and a unicorn brooch studded with tiny diamonds and rubies, all gifts from the playwright’s flush days.

“We were luckily walking by Tiffany, and I was repeating one of my nanny rhymes--’Unicorns do not exist, they only think they do. Unicorns do not exist, they’ve better things to do.’ Isn’t it lovely? And then Tennessee yelled and we flew into Tiffany, and he bought me that. I love the little diamond hoof. It’s so Tennessee. He gave such lovely presents.”

Williams also gazes from a 1953 photograph propped on a hotel coffee table, poised at the wheel of his Sunliner sedan. Next to him sit his beloved grandfather, the Rev. Walter Dakin, who sports a white cap, and Mr. Moon, one of many English bulldogs that passed through the playwright’s life and homes. The photo is a prickly memory, as her commentary, laced through the letters, tells: “When Tennessee was in London, Maria’s mother looked at the snapshot . . . and then in a dreamy voice said: ‘Tennessee, I never knew that dogs wore white peaked caps in America.’ . . . He never totally forgave her.”

When Maria did finally meet Williams’ ailing grandfather, at a nursing home in St. Louis, the incident was equally ill fated. “He’d already had a slight stroke. We took in ginger wine, which he drank with a straw. We smuggled it past the nurse. He was in his bed, deaf as a post, 97. And Tennessee was very excited because he was proud of me. And he said, ‘Grandfather, here is Maria.’

“Grandfather said, ‘She’s just come from Korea?’

“And then (Williams) got into a rage with his grandfather and said, ‘I’ve just written this play about her,’ and Grandfather said, ‘What play?’ And he said, ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,’ and Grandfather said, ‘Cats don’t come at half past eight, tap, tap, tapping at the garden gate,’ which was so lovely. He just said this little rhyme, which sent Tennessee into hysterics because he decided that half past eight was the exact time that the curtain went up, and if the cats don’t come knocking, that means there won’t be an audience. Paranoia, of course, bad luck.

“He snatched that ginger wine from his grandfather. It was no nonsense. He stamped out of the nursing home and said, ‘Such bad luck. I wish I hadn’t told Grandfather.’ He was terribly superstitious.”

The tempestuous Southerner and the Russian aristocrat may have seemed unlikely soul mates to the uninitiated. St. Just was the daughter of a prominent White Russian surgeon appointed to attend the Dowager Empress. Born Maria Britneva in Leningrad, she was brought up in London as the revolution consumed her homeland. Britneva, who eventually married her childhood friend, the banking scion Lord Peter St. Just, studied ballet as a child and performed at Covent Garden with the Ballets Russe de Monte Carlo. When a foot injury derailed her ballet career, she turned to acting, studying at the Old Vic School in London and later joining John Gielgud’s theater company.

But what St. Just shared with Williams--beyond a love for the theater--was an appreciation for nonsense. And when his play openings around the globe threatened to make Williams crazy, he would summon Maria from London, because she was the one person whose sense of humor could prove more compelling than his nerves.

“As he says somewhere, ‘I’ve always pressed the panic button for Maria.’ We had such fun together. We doubled up with laughter most of the time. We had our little private jokes. Whatever it was, when things went wrong, we always said it was Liebling’s fault,” St. Just says, referring to the theatrical agent, William Liebling, who was married to Williams’ agent of 30 years, Audrey Wood. “It had nothing whatever to do with poor Liebling. But we had to have some sort of scapegoat. It was really very funny.”

Liebling came in handy at the 1955 Broadway opening of “Cat” as well. In the book, St. Just recalled the tremors that surrounded the evening: “In his usual state of nerves, Tennessee kept muttering loudly to no one in particular during the performance: ‘You see, people are talking all the way through my play,’ and ‘It’s absolutely disgraceful,’ and ‘They’re talking, you see,’ and ‘They’re spoiling my play.’ All around us the audience was saying ‘Shh! Shh!’ Eventually I had to snap at Tennessee savagely: ‘You’re the one who’s talking--you’re spoiling your own play!’

“At the interval I felt obliged to remove him from the theater and stop him from having a fight with himself. We went across the road to a sort of semi-strip bar, where we gloomily sat, Tennessee convinced the whole evening was a disaster.

“We returned and stood at the back of the theater during the last scene. It finished with an enormous ovation for Tennessee and the cast. Tennessee was still unconvinced. He succeeded in having a blinding row in the middle of the first-night party with Audrey Wood, who had done no harm to anyone. He told her she had ruined the play, and that it was all Liebling’s fault, anyway!”

St. Just did more than hold Williams’ hand in cab rides to the theater. She was the one person, Kazan wrote, Williams would seek out when he wanted “a loyal, because absolutely true, reaction” to his plays--their poetry and productions.

“There’s always a bit of ambiguity in everything,” she says. “Tennessee always left questions unanswered and that’s interesting. There were 16 productions of Tennessee in Russia. I was at home and he was staying with us and a letter arrived from Russia. I was absolutely outraged because they’d done ‘Streetcar’ and they changed the end. This was in Moscow. (Blanche du Bois) never went into a mental home at all and she married Mitch.

“And I translated this to Tennessee. I said, ‘Isn’t this outrageous, Tennessee? You’ve got to stamp your foot and do something!’ Tennessee laughed, and he said, ‘Of course, they’re absolutely right. She’d have conned her way out of that nursing home in a fortnight. She’d have married Mitch, yes.’ ”

Williams called St. Just his “Five O’Clock Angel” because of her last words to her dying grandmother: “When will I see you, my angel?” her grandmother asked. “At five o’clock” came the reply. Tennessee signed his letters “10.”

Not all the sobriquets the two bandied about were quite so adorable. The pair, who reveled in St. Just’s Russian passion for pet names, nicknamed Williams’ friend Carson McCullers “Choppers” because St. Just decided her cheeks looked like lamb chops.

Even Williams’ longtime companion, Frank Merlo, wasn’t spared--they called him “the Horse” because of his large teeth. Merlo’s equine appearance was not lost on the irascible Tallulah Bankhead, who met him during a Miami run of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” “Bankhead was horrid to the Horse,” Williams wrote St. Just in 1956. “When he arrived, I said:Isn’t he good-looking? And she said, ‘He looks like a horse. It’s very nice of you to love such a hideous person.’ ”

Williams loved impromptu jaunts, to Broadway, Rome, Tangier, anywhere he could dissipate his unyielding restlessness. So, in their younger days, the three of them would often pick up and cross continents.

“I was ready to go anywhere, Russia, Barcelona, Hong Kong,” St. Just says. “I absolutely adored it. I didn’t mind at all because I was rather wild in that way. This is what Tennessee should have called his memoirs and didn’t, ‘Flee Flee This Sad Hotel.’ He wanted to call them that and I think Doubleday stopped him.”

After St. Just married Peter Grenfell, the Lord St. Just, in 1956, she settled at Wilbury, the family’s spectacular 1,000-acre estate in Wiltshire, England. She pretty much retired from acting (she once played Blanche, but never, oddly, Maggie, because “I was too young and I was English. I would have mucked it up”). Instead, St. Just tended to her family, which came to include daughters Pulcheria and Natasha, now in their early 30s. Her familial role also meant she was less free to follow Williams’ peripatetic whims. And, of course, there were always the letters.

“The thing about Tennessee I did learn very quickly was that if I really wanted him to listen to what I had to say about anything, I would always write to him,” St. Just says. “He was a writer and the written word penetrated far quicker and deeper than the spoken word. “He was not very articulate in real life. He was much more articulate with his pen. There would be long silences, which I never minded. I’m a chatterbox and I would chatter away. Tennessee would listen or not listen. Basically, the written word had more meaning for him than the spoken word.”

In 1963, Merlo died of lung cancer (on the back of a photograph of Merlo, Williams wrote: “When your candle burns low, you’ve got to believe that the last light shows you something besides the progress of darkness”). And Williams fell victim to a procession of mercenary young men, whom he referred to as his “traveling companions.”

“He was so afraid of being alone. He was so lonely. I used to snarl at him, ‘What are you whining about? What’s wrong with being alone?’ Because I loved being alone. He’d say, ‘It’s all very well for you, Maria. You can choose. I can’t.’ Of course, I never thought of that.”

Still, St. Just couldn’t help registering her disapproval of Williams’ less charming companions, such as the young man who billed the playwright 500 pounds for having to endure dinner with St. Just.

“I can’t tell you how it cheered us up, too,” she says. “We’d just come back from a flop. And you think someone is being really spiteful, ‘I’m going to hurt Tennessee,’ and we cried with laughter. We were sitting at dinner, one of these rather chi chi places with candles, which were blowing in and out every five seconds, and Tennessee kept saying, ‘I don’t believe this.’ I don’t know about the 500. I expect Tennessee gave it to him.”

And so Williams would always say it was the women in his life who were most important--even though people thought just the opposite was true, St. Just says. “He was fascinated by women, adored women. The first was (his sister) Rose and his grandmother. And then Hazel, who was the girl he was in love with, who comes through all the early journals. She was his first real love when he was in college. He quotes her at the end of his journal saying, ‘Tom, do you ever think I would ever say anything that would hurt you?’ And then Marion Vaccaro (the widow of the heir to the United Fruit fortune, nicknamed ‘Banana Queen’), who died.

“And then, of course, ‘There’s Maria,’ he says. ‘Ever since 1948 there’s been Maria, who’s fiercely and actively alive.’ Lovely.”

In “Five O’Clock Angel,” Williams writes in a letter: “What a flat-sounding word (friendship) is for what becomes, later on in life, the most important element of it! To me the French word for this deep relationship, probably all the deeper because it exists outside and beyond the physical kind of devotion, is much more appealing. It covers a broader spectrum and surely its depth is greater. The word is l’amitie . . .

“L’amitie never involves a material transaction. You don’t see it in a shop window with a price tag attached to it or close beside it, and it requires no exertion of will to animate it with the breath of spirit. It is a consecrated thing and it is devoutly to be wished for, because, if it is real as opposed to artificial or trivial, it can endure until death, and Miss Elizabeth Barrett Browning was convinced that it lasted after. I think she was right to the extent that it lasts afterwards in the heart of the survivor . . .

“I have been told and have no reason to doubt that l’amitie can exist between two men as well as between a man and a woman, but in my case it has occurred usually always with someone of the opposite gender.

“I have had many close friendships with men which were without any sexual connotations, God knows. But I have found them less deeply satisfying than those I have had with a few women.

“Of these women, the most important has been with Maria, as both Maria Britneva or as the Lady St. Just.”

He returned the favor by advising her on everything from love to money to poetry. And when her beloved cousin lay on her deathbed, Williams flew to her side and waited outside the sickroom for St. Just to emerge--hours later. “I said, ‘Tennessee, I thought you’d gone back to the hotel.’ And he said, ‘As long as I’m here, you’re never coming out of that room alone.’ Now where do you get that? You just don’t, do you?’ ”

But for the longest time, St. Just kept their private relationship private. “Tennessee was like part of my family,” she says. “And you don’t boast or talk about something that’s so precious and so personal.”

Then, as his letters turned up over the decades, both in her antique Russian trunk and folded within books at Wilbury, she considered how useful they could be in rewriting his public history. If Williams’ later unfettered years had produced a bizarre portrait of a tormented, boorish, failed artist, she had the wherewithal to tell the rest of the story, of a ferociously disciplined, often hurting man, devoted to his friends, generous with his family. And that was the tenderness he offered to his characters--the misbegotten, the aging spinsters, the dying behemoths, the lonely and the lost. But first, she consulted her Russian Orthodox priest, who convinced her that publishing the letters would not violate his confidences.

“This must come out,” she says firmly. “This is what I remember so much, not so much the dark days, but the light, wonderful, fragile days of laughter and poetry and reading things together and sharing. I really was very blessed,” and here her voice trails off, as she seems to consider how past tense it all is, “to have that in my life. With such a person, such a wonderful, magnificent human being. There wasn’t anything he didn’t understand and didn’t have compassion for. There’s a wonderful line, he says, in ‘The Night of the Iguana.’

“ ‘Nothing human disgusts me.’ Wonderful. And it’s true.”