Writer Recalls How Tennessee Williams Brought Warmth to Icy Voyage

Seven years have gone by since Broadway theaters dimmed their marquees at the death of Tennessee Williams, but his poetic genius burns brightly as ever along the Great White Way.

This past season was illuminated by stunning revivals of “Cat On a Hot Tin Roof,” starring Kathleen Turner, and “Orpheus Descending,” with Vanessa Redgrave.

Now “Five O’Clock Angel,” his letters to Maria St. Just, the Russian emigre actress who held his quaking hand many an opening night and whose unquenchable vitality inspired Maggie the Cat, is stirring a kindlier look at this melancholy dreamer whose sad descent into alcohol, drugs and what he called his “deviant satyriasis”--pathetic homosexual cruising--led to the violent ward and threatened his co-billing with Eugene O’Neill as America’s greatest playwright.

Reading those touching, candid letters, I was reminded of my own chance meeting with Williams six months before the then Maria Britneva mistook for an understudy the “unassuming, vulnerable little man” in mismatched socks sitting alone on a sofa at a party in John Gielgud’s London house.

I encountered him on a ship, the SS America, which sailed from New York on Dec., 30, 1947, bound for Cobh, Ireland, Cherbourg, France, and Southampton, England, leaving behind the greatest recorded snowstorm in the city’s history. On the day after Christmas, 25.8 inches had fallen in 12 hours.

I wasn’t even a cub reporter then. I was a 22-year-old college senior and ex-GI on my way to Ireland to marry a farmer’s daughter I met on the steps of a church in Hochst, Germany, just after the war.

The name Tennessee Williams appeared on the passenger list slipped under the door of the steerage class cabin, deep in the bowels of the ship, that I shared with three elderly strangers. Only one of them, a refugee piano craftsman from Hitler’s Germany who was going back to hunt for a lost love in the rubble of Hamburg, had ever heard of the playwright. He encouraged my youthful, idolatrous whim to seek an audience with the occupant of the suite on the boat deck whose “A Streetcar Named Desire” had opened to thunderous applause and 20 curtain calls just three weeks before.

On a loose-leaf page from a lecture notebook, I begged an interview on behalf of the Marlboro College Citizen, a mimeographed campus publication that came out whenever English majors like me at that brand-new college in Vermont could be coaxed from the ski slopes. The surly cabin boy who finally answered the call bell seemed indifferent to the message entrusted to his care and even more unimpressed with the quarter I pressed into his palm. But in less than an hour down came an answer, inquiring “if 2 p.m. tomorrow would be convenient?”

That was New Year’s Eve. As the appointed hour approached, an assistant purser dangling an enormous set of keys passed me through the locked wooden gates, resembling rodeo corral dividers, leading from tourist class through the better-lit corridors of cabin class on up to the Art Deco splendor of first class. There a tiny elevator attended by a midget in a commodore’s uniform made the final ascent to the boat deck. While I tried to review the questions I intended to ask, my gatekeeper prattled on about the two blue-ribbon steers from the Chicago livestock fair that would make their bow as beef Wellington at the captain’s midnight gala ushering in 1948.

Williams was the first celebrity I ever met, and still lingers in memory as the kindest.

Although snow could be seen streaming past the porthole and the boat deck echoed with the clank of seamen scraping icicles from the lifeboat davits, the playwright was wearing a white Palm Beach suit, a flowered sports shirt and leather-thonged sandals over argyle socks that matched. As we shook hands, a waiter arrived with champagne in a silver bucket and an enormous tub of glistening black caviar.

In the intervening four decades, no interview subject has shown such hospitality. Yet my host was touchingly apologetic.

“I hope you don’t find this too pretentious,” he said in the soft Southern drawl that imprinted those opening words indelibly in memory, “but I just can’t help living it up. Four years ago tonight, I was an usher at the Strand Theater, making $17 a week.”

With deep musical laughter punctuated by a hacking cough, he signed the bar chit and peeled off a $20 bill for the delighted steward. “Success is wonderful,” he said, proffering a toast. “I wish you buckets of it. You are going to be a writer, aren’t you, and not an English professor?”

His anxious tone and the sudden narrowing of those clear blue eyes conveyed great compassion for budding authors but dark suspicion of future academics who might degenerate into critics.

The first sentence I managed to blurt out bragged of a recent acceptance slip from Ellery Queen’s magazine. He told of his delight at the sale of his first short story to a horror magazine for $15.

I don’t recall if he was shy or blushed easily, as Maria St. Just remembered their first meeting. I just know I was shyer. I stammered terribly in those days, much worse than now. I remember most his patience and sensitivity in never trying to supply the words my saliva-sputtering lips were trembling to bite out. Most stutterers prefer defeat to rescue.

Success came late to Williams. He was then a few months shy of his 37th birthday. He spoke sadly, almost resentfully, of the long time it took him to gain a college degree--nine years, as I recall--but relished with boyish enthusiasm almost every detail of his two Broadway smash successes. Soon he would be in London, arranging the opening of “The Glass Menagerie” and “perhaps a Stockholm production too.” This seemed to amaze him.

The cabin steward arriving with fresh towels was invited to join me in inspecting the array of bon voyage telegrams plastered on his dresser mirror, and his “Christmas toys,” good luck charms treasured from the Dec. 3 opening night party for “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

“That tiny trolley is from Marlon, and Jessica sent the Southern belle doll,” he said, indicating the gifts from the show’s stars, Marlon Brando and Jessica Tandy.

The toy trolley reminded him that another streetcar named “Cemeteries” passed by his French Quarter apartment in New Orleans. “Quite appropriate,” he said, more to himself in the mirror than to me. Suddenly his mood became grave and melancholy.

He asked if I had read “The Glass Menagerie.” I told him I had seen it with a free ticket from the Stagedoor Canteen on an Army furlough.

“Then you saw the incomparable Laurette Taylor,” he sighed, almost on the verge of tears. “I owe everything to her.” He was still mourning the death over a year ago of the alcoholic has-been shunned for a decade by Broadway producers before bringing to luminous life Amanda Wingdale, alias Edwina Williams, Tennessee’s dreamy, doting mother.

Staring out the porthole, he murmured something about “Streetcar” being his last play, his “swan song.” This didn’t seem to make much sense, because I had read about another play, “Summer and Smoke,” trying out at a theater-in-the-round in Dallas.

Many years later, Gore Vidal, who became his friend on that European trip, told me Williams was convinced then, against all medical evidence, that he was dying of pancreatic cancer.

Seven chiming bells in the passageway, signifying 3:30, abruptly dispelled his despondency.

Soon he was laughing again and stroking his mustache at what even then must have been the sine qua non query of all Williams interviews: How did someone born in Columbus, Miss., raised in St. Louis and in love ever after with New Orleans, come to be called Tennessee?

As he has explained so many times since, he was “merely indulging the old Southern weakness for going out on a limb of the family tree.” Grandsires a couple of greats back on his father’s side had been chancellor of the territory that became Tennessee and the state’s first senator and governor.

Next morning, the mood of the North Atlantic changed just as abruptly. Soft Grandma Moses snowflakes gave way to churning seas, flying spume beaded with ice and an eerie keening wind that made doors leading to the decks almost impossible to push open.

Even on the calmest sea, the 33,500-ton SS America rolled relentlessly. No wonder in her wartime interlude as the troop transport West Point it had been chosen for “Operation Seasick,” a controlled test of a new maritime palliative called Dramamine.

Now the piano in the lounge had to be lashed down, and “fiddles”--little wooden guard rails--were raised on the tables in the nearly deserted dining salons to keep crockery and glassware from careening to bits.

To escape the retching sounds and odors of my stricken mates in that airless inside cabin, I set about exploring the ship. I lurched and grabbed my way down endless staircases, past the engine room and the coiled anchor chain, to the swimming pool. The only one in the water, which rose and fell like a giant indoor wave, was Tennessee Williams. Doing sit-ups beside the pool were several young men whose sweat shirts identified them as members of the U.S. bobsled team, keeping in shape for the Winter Olympics at St. Moritz, Switzerland.

Waving me over, the playwright climbed out, toweled off and groped through the pocket of his paisley robe for an envelope. It was an invitation for the following evening to his “delayed New Year’s Party,” which had to be delayed again because of the storm.

When the gale finally subsided, my uniformed gatekeeper with the bandoleer of keys escorted me up to the first-class suite. Only a few guests, including the captain and the ship’s doctor, who looked a bit queasy, gathered around the punch bowl. I remember a very pretty French girl whose father was a well-known Paris publisher and some members of a U.S. trade delegation who weren’t sure who was our host. The Olympics were represented by Gus Lussi, the coach, and George Button, the father of figure skater Dick Button, who had caught the Queen Mary and would go on to win a gold medal at St. Moritz.

Also there was a coquettish, aging actress in peroxide bangs who threatened to audition there and then for the role of Blanche DuBois.

For once the shipboard conversation consisted of more than blizzard horror stories. There was much speculation about Henry Wallace’s announced third-party bid for the presidency, which had just caught up with the ship’s newspaper. Williams, who professed little interest in politics, spent most of the time handing around canapes and topping off drinks. Somehow he reminded me then of Jay Gatsby: quite the loneliest person at his own party.

The last time I saw him, dawn was stage-lighting the green bluffs and gray storage sheds of Cork Harbor. Sea gulls were screaming around our twin smokestacks and the carillon of St. Colman’s Cathedral was summoning the faithful to early Mass. Descending the gangplank to the tender taking departing passengers to the customs wharf, I heard a voice drawl down from the boat deck:

“Blessings on your Irish bride.”

Tennessee Williams was alone at the rail, wearing the “good luck topcoat” he had bought on the strength of favorable notices for “Streetcar’s” Philadelphia tryout.