Jeepers Creepers
by
Preston Sinclair
“...the best thing
that ever happened to me. I never felt like a star before in my heart. It was
so wonderful to look down and see a fellow smiling at me.”
Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe
Best viewed with coffee and donuts.
Thursday, July 23, 2015
Wednesday, July 1, 2015
Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage Of The Flesh: Book Review
10
by Preston Sinclair
"I am a monster"
Tennessee Williams
John Lahr's brilliant biography is full of insight and drama without being titillating. Williams' life was like a train wreck waiting to happen. We all know what happens at the end, but we don't know how it happens until we've read 'Mad Pilgrimage Of The Flesh'.
Reading Lahr's narrative was like watching a staged reading. It was as if the significant players Audrey Wood, Elia Kazan, or Marie St. Just were all lined up on stage, dressed in black, waiting with their scripts in front of them to chime into the conversation at hand at the appropriate moment.
This is no pithy breathless bio waiting for some producer to buy the rights and make it into a bio-pic. It's an intelligent round table discussion about Tennessee's life not unlike an episode of Charlie Rose where we get to talk about alcohol and sex.
Let's be honest, Tennessee Williams was promiscuous when he was young. That's a nice southern gentlemanly way of saying he was a slut. There's sometimes a misty foggy nostalgia about homosexuality during the pre-AIDS era. All Tennessee had to worry about was crabs and the clap. Yet, that was a dark time. People could be blackmailed or fired from their jobs for being gay. He broached that subject most eloquently in 'Cat On A Hot Tin Roof'.
Brick and Skipper's relationship was probably one of the first bromances portrayed on stage and it was Skipper who paid the ultimate price with his life. Brick exclaims, 'One man has one great good true thing in his life. One great good thing which is true!—I had a friendship with Skipper.—You are naming it dirty!' What straight guy would even say that? The first rule of a bromance is... never admit to having a bromance.
I'm no expert on relationships, but from what I gather here Tennessee was really bad at them. He was cruel to his lovers. He turned his significant others into paid assistants and treated them like trailer trash. None more so than Frank Merlo who he left to die of lung cancer while he went out to the bars to escape from the reality of his best friend's death.
While the old adage 'write drunk edit sober' has long been attributed to Ernest Hemingway, he may never has said it. That's because it isn't true. Sadly, Tennessee often wrote while he was under the influence of alcohol and prescription drugs and as a result depended of on the kindness of friends like Elia Kazan to fix his mistakes. His friends did what they could to help him until he betrayed them each in his own drug addled way.
Alcohol and drugs ultimately led to Tennessee's demise. There has been much disinformation about Tennessee's death due to the medical examiner's report. Dr Elliot M Gross said Tennessee inhaled a bottle cap and died of asphyxiation and the press widely reported it. I remember being confused about how this could happen myself at the time. The fact of the matter is that he ate a bottle of Secanol pills and drank a bottle of wine. A deadly combination. The bottle cap was found in his mouth, not in his throat. He could have scooped the cap up and accidentally tossed it into his mouth along with the pills in his drug addled delirium while the person he was paying to mind him stupidly left him alone.
As a result, drug abuse and alcoholism awareness was set back another twenty years and we have lost many other talented people such as Scott Newman, River Phoenix, Heath Ledger, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Robin Williams.
If you're already a fan of Tennessee Williams, then you'll consider yourself a student of his work after reading all 602 pages of 'Mad Pilgrimage Of The Flesh'. It makes you question everything which is exactly what Williams would want.
Reading Lahr's narrative was like watching a staged reading. It was as if the significant players Audrey Wood, Elia Kazan, or Marie St. Just were all lined up on stage, dressed in black, waiting with their scripts in front of them to chime into the conversation at hand at the appropriate moment.
This is no pithy breathless bio waiting for some producer to buy the rights and make it into a bio-pic. It's an intelligent round table discussion about Tennessee's life not unlike an episode of Charlie Rose where we get to talk about alcohol and sex.
Let's be honest, Tennessee Williams was promiscuous when he was young. That's a nice southern gentlemanly way of saying he was a slut. There's sometimes a misty foggy nostalgia about homosexuality during the pre-AIDS era. All Tennessee had to worry about was crabs and the clap. Yet, that was a dark time. People could be blackmailed or fired from their jobs for being gay. He broached that subject most eloquently in 'Cat On A Hot Tin Roof'.
Brick and Skipper's relationship was probably one of the first bromances portrayed on stage and it was Skipper who paid the ultimate price with his life. Brick exclaims, 'One man has one great good true thing in his life. One great good thing which is true!—I had a friendship with Skipper.—You are naming it dirty!' What straight guy would even say that? The first rule of a bromance is... never admit to having a bromance.
I'm no expert on relationships, but from what I gather here Tennessee was really bad at them. He was cruel to his lovers. He turned his significant others into paid assistants and treated them like trailer trash. None more so than Frank Merlo who he left to die of lung cancer while he went out to the bars to escape from the reality of his best friend's death.
While the old adage 'write drunk edit sober' has long been attributed to Ernest Hemingway, he may never has said it. That's because it isn't true. Sadly, Tennessee often wrote while he was under the influence of alcohol and prescription drugs and as a result depended of on the kindness of friends like Elia Kazan to fix his mistakes. His friends did what they could to help him until he betrayed them each in his own drug addled way.
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| Key West Studio (c) |
As a result, drug abuse and alcoholism awareness was set back another twenty years and we have lost many other talented people such as Scott Newman, River Phoenix, Heath Ledger, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Robin Williams.
If you're already a fan of Tennessee Williams, then you'll consider yourself a student of his work after reading all 602 pages of 'Mad Pilgrimage Of The Flesh'. It makes you question everything which is exactly what Williams would want.
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