Theater: The Angel of the Odd

(4 of 10)

instinct to shock. I think it's a constructive thing. Hit them with something." To Williams, "them" is the middle class, which is "self-deluded and not facing its basic motivations." As for himself: "I always feel that I bore people and that I'm too ugly. I don't like myself. Why should I?" Except for dimming eyesight (his left eye has been damaged by cataracts), Williams has the assurance of doctors that he is in good health, but he remains a confirmed hypochondriac: "I've always been obsessed that I'm dying of cancer, dying of heart trouble. I think it's good for a writer to think he's dying. He works harder."

Williams is one of the wealthiest playwrights in recent history, but he is fearful that he will die destitute. He has earned some $6,000,000 during his playwrighting career, owns only the house in Key West and a house in Miami. After years of popular and critical success, he has virtually no confidence in his talents and is self-deprecating to the point of abasement: "I always expect total failure. I'm not a good writer. It's incredible that I've managed to write as long as I have. I don't believe it when people say they like my work. I don't believe it."

When this ordeal by tension brought him close to crackup in 1957, Williams went to the late Moss Hart's psychoanalyst, Dr. Lawrence Kubie. Characteristically, Williams broke off the analysis when Dr. Kubie hit him where he lives, his work. Said Kubie: "You've written nothing but violent melodramas, which only succeed because of the violence of the time we live in." Williams' younger brother, Dakin, an amiable East St. Louis attorney and a convert to Roman Catholicism, drops broad hints in person and in print as to how Tennessee can achieve peace of soul. Says Tennessee amusedly: "If it would make him happy, I would have a deathbed conversion. It might help to distract me too."

Five Good Days a Year. The only religion that works for Williams is his writing, and he practices it four hours a day, day in, day out, year in, year out, as if he had taken a vow of discipline.

Whether the day begins in his cluttered fifth-floor apartment in a Manhattan upper East Side brownstone or in his white frame cottage in Key West, Williams brews up a pot of Stygian coffee and plants himself in front of a Smith-Corona electric. He has no set output and contends that "out of a year's writing days, there are only five good ones." He may work on any one of three or four manuscripts. Last week, in Key West, he was working on his next play, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Any More, about a rich, much-married ex-Follies star in her 60s who lives in an Italian villa and recovers her "capacity to feel again'' with a handsome young freeloader.

After about an hour and a half of writing, Williams chases away the first tension spook of the day with an ice-cold martini. He saves part of every afternoon for his only hobby, swimming. In New York, he may go to the theater or a movie in the evenings. In Key West, he barhops or sits home listening to records with his long time secretary, Frank Merlo, a slight man with steel-grey hair. The rest of the house hold consists of two playful bulldogs, Mr. Moon and Baby Doll, and a parrot.

Williams completes a play about