Theater: The Angel of the Odd

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shudders his mother. "I slept with him those first nine nights, applying ice packs to his throat to keep him from choking to death. The fever finally passed, and I thought he had recovered. One day I noticed he was crawling along the floor after his toys, I said, 'Why, Tom, whatever is the matter with your legs?' and called the doctor. His legs were paralyzed. Apparently, during Tom's diphtheria, he swallowed his tonsils.* They poisoned his system. It was two years before he could walk normally."

During that convalescence, Mrs. Williams read to him constantly: "We used up all the children's books, and I had to turn to Scott, Thackeray, Dickens." Tom's grandfather, who knew Milton's Paradise Lost by heart, recited poetry to him. "Grandfather was crazy about Poe. He was interested in the macabre," says Williams.

In 1918, C.C. was posted to St. Louis as a branch sales manager, and Tom and his sister were uprooted once again. Gone were the sunlit spacious backyards of Mississippi, replaced by rows of brick flats the color of "dried blood and mustard." The children sang in the Episcopal choir, but were made to feel like social untouchables. At home, the parents often "quarreled horribly,'' and C.C. grew more and more dissatisfied with his son. He felt the boy was "sissified," wanted him to play baseball, took a bitter delight in calling him "Miss Nancy."

Into Print. With characteristic self-dramatization, Williams dates his urge to write from his sister Rose's arrival at puberty, leaving him behind in "the country of childhood." (It happens that his mother bought him a $10 typewriter around the same time.) His first writing coup was of a sort to make his father apoplectic. Pen-named as a woman, the 14-year-old Tom won a $25 Smart Set contest on the subject "Can a Good Wife Be a Good Sport?" He went on to be published in a magazine called Weird Tales, with a story titled, The Vengeance of Nitocris. Opening sentence: "Hushed were the streets of many-peopled Thebes."

From the age of twelve, Tom had spent a lot of time at the home of a girl named Hazel Kramer, "an incredibly lovely person, tremendously understanding, a terrific sense of humor." C.C. did not like her. When he heard that she was entering the University of Missouri with Tom, he pressured her grandfather, who worked for International Shoe, to send her to another school. She married someone else, and died while still young. That was the closest Williams came to marriage, though certain actresses have since had crushes on him. Says Anna Magnani, for whom he wrote The Rose Tattoo: "Tennessee is the only man I would marry immediately, if he asked me, because he is so full of emotion."

Into Shoe Biz. Williams stayed at the University of Missouri for three years. Then his father, who had been a second lieutenant in the Spanish-American War, yanked him out of school for flunking R.O.T.C. and put him to work in the shoe company.

Williams got $65 a month as a clerk-typist and odd-job man. Though he now jokes about his rise "from shoe biz to show biz," he hated the job. He would begin the day dusting shoes, "thousands and thousands of shoes." Nights, right after supper, he would go to his room, which was just big enough to hold a bed,