The Whole World Was Watching: My Life Under the Media Microscope
An excerpt from my autobiography, The Whole World Was Watching: My Life Under the Media Microscope. This section focuses on a visit to Key West, Florida, where I ran into two literary giants:
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While trying to decide what to do next, I went down to Key West, Florida. One night I found myself at a tiny bar at the Pier House Hotel sitting between Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote, both drunk and drug-fueled to the hilt. I will never forget Truman’s slimy handshake, which was like trying to grip a slippery fish. I don’t remember much of what was said that night, but I remember being a kid in a room with two drunken literary giants.
I later learned this was Truman’s only trip to Key West. In this except from Dotson Rader’s 1985 book, Tennessee: Cry of the Heart, Tennessee gave his account of the visit. “Truman came to Key West from the Yucatan. He had never been on the island before, and I suspect that he never will be there again. He was robbed the first night, losing all his credit cards, his address book and about two thousand dollars. He said that he wasn’t in his hotel room when the robbery occurred, but the police found no evidence of forced entry. I think he was cleaned out by some street boy he invited home for a private session!”
Capote came to Key West because he sold excerpts of his book, Answered Prayers, to Esquire. He made it one of the conditions of the contract that the editor of the magazine, Don Erickson, had to fly to Key West to pick up the manuscript. He did that because Hemingway used to make Arnold Gingrich, the editor/founder of Esquire, come to Key West to edit his stories before they were published. Truman was not about to get one thing less than Hemingway.
“One night Truman, Jimmy Kirkwood, and a friend of Truman’s, I, and some other men went to dinner. His friend was very drunk. The restaurant was full of tourists in double-knit suits, and since it was quite late, most of them were as tipsy as Truman’s boyfriend. Some distance away, at a round table, sat three couples. Truman noticed them staring at us, and he said, ‘Watch out! They’ll be coming over for autographs!’
“And a few minutes later, one of the women at the table got up and came over, carrying a menu. She asked Truman to autograph the menu. He did. She left, and a few minutes later her husband came to our table and glared at Truman. ‘Are you Truman Capote?’ And Truman said, ‘I was this morning!’ And the man unzipped his pants, and pulled out his cock. He said, holding it in the palm of his hand, ‘Can you put your signature on this? And Truman looked down at the cock, and up again, and said, ‘I don't know about my signature. But I can initial it!.’”
Sadly, I was so young that the several times I met Tennessee Williams after the drinking session with Capote I never engaged in a real conversation with him. That’s because I didn’t genuinely understand the depth or meaning of his writing. It was always easy being around him, however, since he was very funny. Once, I shot some video of him at a Halloween festival, when he was asked what the holiday meant to him. He responded, slurring on camera, “Halloween is just a drag to me.” The clip aired nationally on NBC’s TODAY show.
Only in my later years would I come to have a much deeper appreciation of his work. I was in my 40s before I understood the meaning of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a play Tennessee wrote that opened on Broadway two days before his 44th birthday. The play would win Williams his second Pulitzer Prize. Though he was well known before this play, it was Cat that made me appreciate the unique take that Williams had on life in the South. It took me years to understand it and I wanted to go back in time to talk with him about it. But it was too late…he was gone. That’s the waste that happens when you’re very young and meet truly accomplished people.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is the story of a Southern family in crisis. As it develops, it becomes clear that the family has constructed a complex web of deceit that defines the way it lives. It is the same way in the real South to this day. One of the great lines comes from the character, Big Daddy: “What’s that smell in this room? Didn’t you notice it, Brick? Didn’t you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room?... There ain’t nothin’ more powerful than the odor of mendacity... You can smell it. It smells like death.”
Tennessee Williams nailed Southern life cold. No one has ever done it better. He led a colorful and tragic life. Born in 1911 in Columbia, Mississippi, Williams was a sickly child terrorized by his violent traveling-salesman father. When he was seven, the family moved to St. Louis, where his father became manager of a shoe company. Persecuted and taunted by his father, he took refuge in reading and writing and in a close relationship with his beloved sister, Rose.
At 14, he won a prize in a national writing competition and three years later sold a short story to Weird Tales magazine. Williams studied at the University of Missouri at Columbia but left to work in his father's shoe warehouse for three years. He later attended Washington University in St. Louis and finally graduated from the University of Iowa at age 27. Sadly, his sister, Rose, who suffered severe mental disturbances that Williams blamed on his father’s violence, was lobotomized during this time.
Williams started writing plays during college and continued when he moved to New Orleans in the 1930s, where he changed his name from Thomas to Tennessee. In 1939, he won an award for a small production of his one-act collection, American Blues. He worked briefly in Hollywood as a screenwriter and later turned a failed screenplay into the play, The Glass Menagerie. The play launched Williams to critical success, which he maintained until the 1960s, when the critics turned on him. However, he continued writing until his death in 1983, when he choked on a medicine-bottle cap at the age of 71.
As the years went by, the work of Tennessee Williams became more important to me, especially in interpreting Southern life in my writing.