knack of turning water into wine and thence to Kentucky Straight Bourbon. ‘I knew it was whisky it finally turned into,’ he explains, ‘because he needed somebody to come up out of the audience to help him, and I came up – both shows!’ – a line that always gets a big laugh. ‘But the wonderfullest trick of all,’ he continues, blundering around the stage like a hooked trout, ‘was the coffin trick. We nailed him into a coffin and he got out of the coffin without removing one nail. There is a trick that would come in handy for me – get me out of this 2 by 4 situation!’
As it happens, none of this tomfoolery was in the original manuscript. During the first round of rehearsals in Chicago in the winter of 1944, the director Eddie Dowling, who also played the role of Tom, improvised a much cruder drunk scene. Williams was horrified, but eventually agreed to produce his own sleeker version. Intentional or not, the coffin trick serves as an elegant figure for the play’s larger concerns, its nightmare of genteel poverty and co-dependence. Coffin was also, it might be added, the middle name of Williams’s father Cornelius, from whose oppressive influences he’d only just escaped.
The audience never actually gets to witness the mirror-Tom’s version of the coffin trick. Instead, he tells them about it, in one of those lyrical asides that must have helped, along with Laurette Taylor’s extraordinary performance as Amanda, to seduce the theatregoers of first Chicago and then New York. ‘I didn’t go to the moon,’ he announces from the fire escape, as in a lighted window behind him his mother comforts his distraught sister:
I went much further – for time is the longest distance between two places –
Not long after that I was fired for writing a poem on the lid of a shoebox.
I left Saint Louis. I descended the steps of this fire escape for a last time and followed, from then on, in my father’s footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space – I travelled around a great deal. The cities swept about me like dead leaves, leaves that were brightly colored but torn away from the branches.
I would have stopped but I was pursued by something. It always came upon me unawares, taking me altogether by surprise . . .
From the moment those lines first echoed around the Playhouse in New York, in April 1945, Tennessee was catapulted into a different kind of world. He became a public figure, with all the opportunity, scrutiny and pressure fame brings. It wasn’t by any means a comfortable shift, though he’d longed for it since he was a sickly little boy, lying in bed in his grandfather’s house in Columbus, Mississippi, acting out the fall of Troy with no audience or actors except a deck of cards, the black against the red.
Looking back decades later, in the Paris Review interview of 1981, he made two contradictory remarks about this sudden change in fortune. First, he described the play’s success as ‘terrible’. Although there were twenty-four curtain calls on the opening night and he was pulled from his seat to face wild applause, he claims that in photographs taken the next morning it’s obvious he was visibly depressed. A few lines on, he contradicts himself, or seems to, saying: ‘Before the success of Menagerie I’d reached the very, very bottom. I would have died without the money . . . So if I suddenly hadn’t had this dispensation from Providence with Menagerie, I couldn’t have made it for another year, I don’t think.’
Luckily, Providence sent something else his way, or God knows how he would have borne the increasing strain of the coming years. In the summer of 1947, he spent a blissful hour in the dunes in Provincetown with a beautiful Sicilian-American called Frank Merlo. They liked one another immediately, but because Tennessee was at the time embroiled with someone else they didn’t stay in touch. A year passed and then late one fall evening on Lexington Avenue, Tennessee saw the young man inside a deli. ‘Accidental and marvellous,’ he wrote of that re-encounter almost three decades later, when the walls had long since caved in on his own life.
Frank came back to Tennessee’s apartment on East 58th Street for a midnight feast: roast beef on rye with pickles and potato salad. ‘Frankie and I kept looking at one another,’ he wrote in Memoirs, peering back wistfully at those two bright-eyed boys, their hair slicked, their hearts, I’d guess, running a little fast. The apartment belonged to a sculptor and was all white inside, with an exotic garden behind walls of frosted glass. The bedroom was decorated like a merman’s cavern, with an illuminated aquarium and a tangle of sea shells, driftwood and fishing nets. ‘A piece of enchantment,’ he wrote, and then: ‘the magical carpet of the big bed’.
As for falling in love, that took a little longer. It wasn’t until Tennessee was staying in St. Louis, under his mother’s roof, that he realised how much he missed Frank, who he’d nicknamed the Little Horse on account of his long face. He sent a wire, asking him to wait at the apartment, but when he arrived home it seemed deserted. ‘I felt quite desolate,’ the older Tennessee remembered. He went into the enchanted bedroom and there on the big bed was little Frankie, fast asleep: his companion and guardian for the next fourteen years.
It was getting late. I walked back to the hotel through Sutton Place, took a bath, put on a dress and heels and went out again into the twilight. It was the cocktail hour, that lovely moment which in cinema is called magic time, the hour of the wolf. On its way to darkness the sky had turned an astonishing, deepening blue, flooding with colour as abruptly as if someone had opened a sluice. In that instant the city resembled a huge aquarium, the skyscrapers rising in the wavering light like underwater plants, the cabs flashing through the streets like shoals of fish, darting north at changeover as the lights tripped green all the way to Central Park.
I walked by way of 55th Street to the King Cole bar at the St. Regis, where among ten thousand other illustrious events the opening night party for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was held. If you want old-style glamour in New York you come here, or else go to the Plaza, or to Bemelman’s at the Carlyle, where the walls are painted with debonair rabbits getting up to mischief in a fantastical version of the park.
The room was low-lit and subtly burnished. I ordered a King’s Passion and sat on a banquette by the door, catty-corners from a Russian woman in a slippery white blouse. I’d entered Cheever territory, no doubt about it. John Cheever: the small, immaculately dishevelled Chekhov of the Suburbs, who despite his long association with the wealthy upstate town of Ossining lived in Manhattan from the age of twenty-two until the morning after his thirty-ninth birthday.
His last residence was just around the corner, on East 59th Street, and the St. Regis was among his favourite haunts. He liked anything that smacked of old money. In 1968, long after he’d left the city, his publishers put him up at the hotel for a two-day press junket, during which time he impressed one reporter by ordering two bottles of Scotch and gin. (‘Guess what the bill is?’ he said gleefully when they arrived. ‘Twenty-nine dollars! Wait until Alfred Knopf sees that!’) 1968: five years before he went careering around Iowa City with Raymond Carver, and seven years before he found himself at Smithers, sharing a room with a failed delicatessen owner and learning how to live without either the sorrows or the consolations of gin.
Cheever fascinated me because he was, in common with many alcoholics, a helpless mix of fraudulence and honesty. Though he feigned patrician origins, his upbringing in Quincy, Massachusetts was both financially and emotionally insecure, and while he eventually attained all the trappings of the landed Wasp he never managed to shake a painful sense of shame and self-disgust. He was an almost exact contemporary of Tennessee’s, and though they weren’t friends, their worlds in the New York of the 1930s and 40s often overlapped. In fact, Mary Cheever first realised her husband wasn’t entirely heterosexual while they were at the first Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire.
According to Blake Bailey’s beautiful biography, Cheever, there was a leitmotif
