Lyle Leverich; Tennessee Williams Fan Became the Playwright’s Biographer

He was, by his own description, a would-be reporter, frustrated screenwriter, erstwhile encyclopedia salesman, producer and bookstore owner. But biographer? He had never written a book.

So when people in literary and theater circles heard he was tackling a biography of one of America’s greatest playwrights, the prolific and enigmatic Tennessee Williams, the reaction was: Who is Lyle Leverich?

Leverich, like his subject, was a gay man who had a passion for the stage. He met the playwright in 1976 when he produced one of Williams’ works for a small San Francisco theater. The two fell into long conversations in which Williams poured out details about his dysfunctional family--the garrulous and puritanical mother, the drunken and abusive father, the psychologically crippled sister. A friendship was forged.

But it stunned even Leverich when the playwright turned to him after a Kennedy Center awards program in 1979 and introduced him to his brother Dakin as the person who “is writing my biography.”

Leverich worked on the manuscript for years, finally producing “Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams,” published in 1995 by Crown. The 600-page tome, which covered just the first 34 years of the playwright’s life, was well-received by critics and is considered the definitive Williams biography.

Leverich, 79, died Dec. 17, leaving unfinished a second and final volume on Williams. He died at a San Rafael, Calif., hospital of a heart seizure and complications of diabetes. He is survived by a half brother, Lyle Taylor Leverich of Saratoga, Calif.

Leverich had spent much of his adult life wandering from one occupation to another. “Before the age of 40,” he told The Times a few years ago, “my motto in life was, ‘If at first you don’t succeed, go on to something else!’ ”

He was born to a Long Island family that lost a real estate fortune in the 1920s. The financial ruin led to his grandfather’s suicide and his parents’ divorce. As a youth, Leverich staged plays in the basement of the family home and spent spare moments outside stage doors waiting to glimpse stars.

He dabbled in journalism and playwriting until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor; he wound up fighting in the South Pacific with the Navy. After the war, he moved to the San Francisco area and tried screenwriting and the bookstore business. Through the Atheneum Summer Arts Festival in Marin County he became involved in the theater and began staging productions.

In 1976, Leverich, a longtime Williams fan, decided to produce “The Two-Character Play,” one of Williams’ later works that he believed critics had misunderstood. Williams made three trips to San Francisco to supervise the production, which Leverich ran on alternate nights with “The Glass Menagerie.” Williams was pleased with the show, which was a critical and popular success. Recalled Leverich, “I’d made a friend.”

Over dinner a few years later, Leverich told the playwright that his salacious “Memoirs” did him a disservice and that a serious book about his life in the theater was needed. “Baby, you write it,” Williams replied. He later gave Leverich two letters of authorization, allowing him access to all his unpublished diaries, letters and manuscripts.

Leverich did not begin the project in earnest until 1983, after Williams’ bizarre death at 71 from choking on the cap from a bottle of eyedrops. When he learned that Williams had died, Leverich, who had been living in New Orleans, immediately packed his bags for New York “and didn’t come up for air until I had completed a 400,000-word first draft.”

The resulting book resolved some of the questions that had surrounded Williams, whose life had been a swamp of gossip and myth, much of it of his own making.

Leverich found the reason for Williams’ name change from Tom to Tennessee (to disguise his age in a New York theater contest for young playwrights). He also moved the date of sister Rose’s lobotomy from 1937 to 1943, placing it closer to the time when Williams was writing “The Glass Menagerie,” considered his most autobiographical play.

Leverich completed the manuscript in 1990. But for the next five years he was consumed in a battle with Williams’ executor, Lady Maria St. Just, who, contrary to Williams’ wishes, denied Leverich permission to quote from the playwright’s papers. While his manuscript languished, rejected by publishers wary of a drawn-out legal battle, Leverich, who had spent his advance money, struggled to survive on a veteran’s pension and Social Security.

The major problem, he said, “was that Tennessee never bothered to specify that I could quote from the works.” But St. Just, a struggling actress who met Williams in 1948 and was thought to be the model for the feisty Maggie of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” apparently was more afraid that Leverich would reveal some of her secrets, including several abortions and Williams’ distaste for her in his last years. St. Just, described in a 1994 New Yorker article as “neither a lady nor a saint nor just,” stymied not only Leverich’s book but other scholarly appraisals and stage productions.

The battle ended only after she died in 1994. The estate cleared publication, allowing the book to come out the next year. Leverich was a first-time author at 75.

In a review for The Times, David Lohrey said the biography “contributes enormously to the resurrection of America’s premier lyrical dramatist. Leverich writes with an authority that casts doubt on the value of virtually all previous biographical studies of Williams.”

Benedict Nightingale, writing in the New York Times, called the book “the most complete and thoroughly researched portrait of Williams yet published.” Playwright Edward Albee praised it as “an extraordinary and invaluable critical biography,” and Arthur Miller, another titan of the stage, touted it as “plainly a work of distinction.”

Leverich said he never asked directly why Williams chose him as authorized biographer. But John Uecker, a New York director who worked as Williams’ assistant in his last years, said a few years ago that, skeptical of Leverich’s qualifications, he once said to Williams, “I really don’t know anything about Lyle Leverich. Have you read anything he’s written?”

Williams bellowed back, “Lyle’s not a writer! A writer’s the last thing I want! Lyle will write the truth, but he’ll be kind.”

That, Uecker said, is what Leverich did.