Playboy Interview: Tennessee Williams

For almost two decades, from 1944 to 1961, Tennessee Williams wrote a series of corrosively eloquent, strangely compelling plays on subjects seldom confronted before outside the nether world of fantasy and nightmare: "A Streetcar Named Desire" (homosexuality, nymphomania, promiscuity, rape), "The Glass Menagerie" (loneliness, sexual frustration), "Summer and Smoke" (profligacy, frigidity), "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (greed, alcoholism, impotence, more homosexuality), "Baby Doll" (crib fetishism, pedophilia), "Orpheus Descending" (blowtorch killing), "Sweet Bird of Youth" (castration, dope addiction, V. D.), "Suddenly, Last Summer" (cannibalism, madness) and "Night of the Iguana" (panty fetishism, masturbation, coprophagy). He got away with it not because he served up aberrant sex and violence with such realistic fervor, as some critics had it, but through shining epiphanies, through his unique vision as a poetic symbolist and mythologer. Not surprisingly, Williams won three New York Drama Critics Circle Awards and two Pulitzer Prizes before he turned 50.

Then something happened. After "The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Any More" unceremoniously flopped in 1962, and again in 1963, the critics began to write Williams' obituary. His one great love---Frank Merlo, who had been with him since 1947---died of cancer; his writing powers diminished; and like the psychically emasculated victims in his plays, America's topmost playwright plummeted with tragic force into a snake pit of coronaries, convulsions, pills, liquor, madness and impotence. The circle of his life seemed to have closed, and to his horror he saw manifested in himself the failure he feared he had been born to.

Thomas Lanier Williams was born 62 years ago in his preacher-grandfather's rectory in Columbus, Mississippi. He was the sensitive, weakling son of Edwina Dakin, a self-styled Southern belle who to this day nurses dreams of a moonlight-and-magnolia tradition that never was and Cornelius Coffin Williams, a brawling Big Daddy of a shoe salesman who called his first-born son "Miss Nancy." Tom, as only his closest friends still call him, can hardly remember a year in which he wasn't ill either physically or mentally: At the age of five, he contracted diphtheria and nearly died, and this malady left him with a kidney ailment. Then his legs were paralyzed for two years, a condition that his mother is certain was due to his having swallowed his tonsils---which is physically impossible. He had his first nervous breakdown at 13. When he was barely 20, his father yanked him out of the University of Missouri and put him to work dusting shoes in a St. Louis shoe factory. He promptly willed himself into another breakdown. While recuperating, he wrote his first play, "Cairo! Shanghai! Bombay!," about places and people he had never known. His schizophrenic sister Rose, on whom he modeled the fragile Laura of "Glass Menagerie," had one of the first prefrontal lobotomies ever performed, from which she has never completely recovered; a muzzy guilt over his inability to help "Miss Rose" stalks him to this day.

Despite---if not because of---these early traumas, Tom Williams managed to get a degree from the University of Iowa at the advanced age of 27. At 28, he lost his first and only true female love---and suffered another breakdown. His application for a job with the WPA writer's project was then summarily rejected as "lacking in social content" and, changing what he considered his "rather dull" name to Tennessee, he went to work as a waiter in a New Orleans beanery. He was forced to hock everything he had, including a borrowed typewriter, to survive.

Williams recalls that during this period he often had what the French call papillons d'amour, because he lacked the price of a bottle of Cuprex, then the standard pubic pesticide. One day, on a crowded street corner, he was accosted by the cry "You bastard, you gave me crabs last night!" That, he says, cut short his social season in the French Quarter. Moreover, according to Williams, one of the mad tenants who lived above him in his boardinghouse had taken to pouring boiling water through cracks in the floor in the hope of scalding him to death. Williams escaped on a string of bed sheets and hit the road with an itinerant musician whose uncle, he said, owned a "magnificent ranch" in Southern California. Before leaving, however, Williams fired off some one-act plays, the offspring of four-A.M. labors of love and compulsion, to a Group Theater contest in New York.

The ranch turned out to be a shabby squab farm where, in 1939, Williams was employed as a feather picker---paid according to the number of feathers he dropped into a milk bottle. One day, a co-worker said to him: "You know, Tom, if you hang out long enough on a corner of this coast, sooner or later a sea gull is going to fly over and shit a pot of gold on you." When the pot hit Williams, it was in the guise of a $100 award for his collection of plays, "American Blues," which he'd entered in the Group Theater contest. Instead of taking the first bus to Manhattan, he bought a bicycle and pedaled down El Camino Real into Mexico, where he was ripped off and raped in a cantina. That forced him back to California, where he worked with diseased chickens on a ranch outside Laguna Beach---and spent what he describes as "the most radiant time of my life" among the artists, cyclists and surfers there.

Late in 1939, Williams learned that he was the recipient of a $1000 Rockefeller grant and took a Greyhound to New York. With airy malice, he wrote in his journal: "The very rich have such a touching faith in the efficacy of small sums." Living at the Y, he was able to buy time to write "Battle of Angels," a mixture of superreligiosity and hysterical sexuality, for the prestigious Theater Guild. It went through Boston like a shot, for, as Williams notes, the critics and the cops seemed to regard it as "a theatrical counterpart of the bubonic plague." So did the audience, which hooted it off the stage.

With another small sum from the Rockefellers, he went to Key West, Florida, where he lived in an old boardinghouse for seven dollars a week and "worked like hell's hammers" on a rewrite of "Angels" (later retooled as "Orpheus Descending"). Back in New York, the Theater Guild dismissed the new version and Williams found himself running the classic job gamut of the itinerant poet: elevator operator, restaurant cashier, theater usher, shoe salesman, teletype operator and poetry-spieling waiter in Greenwich Village's Beggar Bar, where, plagued by cataracts, he affected a black eye patch with a white eye painted on it.

In his free time, he pandered in the streets for an abstract painter he had lived with off and on. Frantic calls to the dramatists' branch of a union devoted, as he puts it, "to the care and feeding of writers" netted him a loan of ten dollars. After three years of penury and humiliation, he was finally "packaged like a slab of beef" and sold to MGM in Hollywood, where he wrote a script for Lana Turner (which was peremptorily rejected) and another called "The Gentleman Caller" (which nobody wanted). The latter became "The Glass Menagerie," ironically the first and last truly elegiac Williams play. The rest is a triumphant---and tragic---volume of theatrical history.

In the past two years, Williams has returned to work with a vengeance---no longer seeking success, he says, only a respectable kind of acceptance. Unburdening himself of doctors, lawyers and managing agents, he has fairly exploded with new ideas, new plays, poetry and short stories. "Two Character Play," his first full-length work in years, has been refurbished since its shaky debuts in London and Chicago and is now Broadway bound as "Out Cry," with Peter Glenville directing Michael York and newcomer Cara Duff-MacCormack in its only roles. "Small Craft Warnings" was a succès d'estime off-Broadway last season and opened in London this January. This spring ushers in two major 25th-anniversary revivals of "A Streetcar Named Desire": The Los Angeles Center Theater Group's version stars Jon Voight and Faye Dunaway, while Manhattan's Lincoln Center offers Rosemary Harris and Stacy Keach. After a decade of professional stillbirths and personal despair, Tennessee Williams has heard his own voice again, and heeded it. To explore the tortured inner landscape of this shy, scared man who, despite his resurgence, still considers himself a failed artist, Playboy sent freelancer C. Robert Jennings to interview him in New York and New Orleans, two of Williams' three adopted homes. (The third is Key West.)

Jennings reports: "Tennessee Williams was directly responsible for my first and lastingest love: the theater. What passed for my adolescence was just peaking when I saw 'Streetcar'---five times---on Broadway and became riveted to the theater for life. Yet I confess that my awe of the playwright had been diminished by his toxic visions and affectations of the past decade. This, curiously, served me well when I went into this assignment: I found the man and the whomped-up myth to be very different, indeed. I came to see that this was not, as Truman Capote had told me, a 'rather dumb man' with a once-flaming talent, nor even the publicity nut that recently he seemed to have become, but a highly private and complex human being with his poetic if not his personal madness under control. He was at once introverted, thin-skinned, humanistic, obdurate, suspicious and vindictive; as cunning, tough and ageless as a crocodile. At first blush, he was disconcertingly crotchety, self-dramatizing, arch, with some of the subhuman idiosyncrasies of the self-made star manqué on the hard comeback trail, a lame phoenix rising unsteadily from bitter ash. In the grimmer reaches of his paranoia, he harbors ancient grievances, like a long-wounded wife. But I came to know that Williams holds with Gide's warning: 'Do not understand me too quickly.'

"I met him in New York after the final performance of his little motel of a play, 'Small Craft Warnings,' which was made notable by his own quite believable performance as a hard-drinking, down-at-the-heels doctor in a seedy Southern California beach bar. Backstage, we were introduced by his new manager, Bill Barnes of International Famous Agency, and Williams greeted me warmly. He is short but oddly handsome. As the only character in the play who wore the same clothes offstage as on---white linen suit and white panama hat, a gold cross on his chest---he was the first to arrive at the closing-night cast party. Noting his unease, I began talking about his play in general and his performance in particular, and I asked him if he was a ham. He looked at me with malevolence and flashed: 'And who are you?' Then to Barnes: 'Who is this?' Bristling, I countered: 'I'm the guy who just crossed a continent to see you, with your OK. We just met.' 'Mmm,' he muttered and wandered uncertainly away.

"As it was already my second day in the city, I assumed that he would get his act together in time to hold our first interview session, which was to have been at dinner, after the party. That turned out to be one of my wilder assumptions. He was so unglued over everyone's tardiness that he dismissed the nonparty as "poorly organized" and sulked out into the muggy Manhattan night with a beautiful Botticelli boy poet, without saying goodbye to anyone. Later I made the tactical error of having a drink with his producer at the bar of the same beanery in which he was dining with three young men, including the poet. Though we were several leagues out of earshot, he accused me the next day of spying on him. Moreover, he seemed convinced that Playboy was out to 'get homosexuals.' With two friends in tow, he was 45 minutes late for our first lunch and made no apology. We were seated at one of the tables favored by the fabled Algonquin Round Table, but Williams turned his back to the room with: 'I don't want to be on display, I'm in a death sweat.'

"Knowing that he drinks mostly wine, I asked if he'd like a cold dry white. Without looking up from the menu, he snapped, 'I think that all depends on what we're eating, don't you?' With which he ordered, all ruffles and flourishes, a Pouilly-Fuissé and chicken pancakes with white meat. When the waiter explained that the meat was mixed, Williams became slightly hysterical and, his noisy drawl turning heads at adjoining tables, said: 'Well, you just have the chef make it all while for me.' When I heard that his sister Rose, long confined to a mental hospital in Ossining, New York, was dining with him at the Plaza, I asked if I might meet her, if only for a minute. He was aghast, rolled his eyes skyward and said: 'Good God, man, you can't be serious.' When later he changed his mind, I had changed mine, too, and he professed to be 'highly disappointed' that I failed to show up. 'She looked so pretty,' he said ruefully. And so it went, achingly.

"Until my third day in New York, just as I was about to split the scene, when I managed somehow to engage his confidence. Though still paranoid, he suddenly dropped his guard and became warm, open, courtly, hospitable, funny---and piteously vulnerable. He never spoke off the record. For Williams, having virtually stripped himself naked in his work, no longer has anything to hide. He is an open wound. He not only asked me up to his suite at the Hotel Elysée, fittingly shabby-genteel and haunted by the ghost of the great Tallulah Bankhead, who had lived there for many years (as had Ethel Barrymore before her), but he invited me to fly to New Orleans with him. There he would seek a respite from his writing, rewriting and acting labors, and I would be talking to an 'exhausted old man.' Besides, he added, only his French Quarter apartment had a handsome young houseboy named Victor who 'looks like a young Gore Vidal,' its own veranda and a huge, full-lipped bust of Lord Byron 'that I always kiss good night---he's very sympathetic.'

"We were driven by chauffeured limousine to the airport, and, when the agent informed Williams that, although he carried a first-class ticket, he had been misbooked in tourist, he flared once more and demanded to see the boss. When another airline agent politely asked for his autograph, he refused. Once in the air, he ordered a vodka martini and, dismayed at the paltry size of it, ordered several more. Relaxed at last, he abruptly changed his manner yet again and, then and for the next six days, gave of himself (and others) intimately, unsparingly and, for the most, part, graciously, revealing more, he averred, than he had in his completed but still unpublished, highly personal memoirs---for which Doubleday advanced him $50,000. His ramblings, whether lucid or manic, were almost always accompanied by giggles or a loud, mad cackle. He also gave equal time to the many people who stopped him on the street, one of whom went on at such length and so boringly about a play that I intervened, then said to Williams: 'That is the price of fame.' Said he: 'The price is too high, baby.' "

[Q] Playboy: Why did you walk out on our first appointment?

[A] Williams: Because I'm blind in one eye and I thought you were Bill Buckley---you do look a bit like him---and I can't stand Bill Buckley. I met his wife at a party once and I was drunk enough to think she was beautiful. At the same party. I was confronted by this creature, George Plimpton, who did three interviews with me for the Paris Review and took three days of my time for each one and printed nothing. He said he lost them, but of course I don't believe it. When he was introduced at the party, I said, "Fortunately, Mr. Plimpton is so much taller than I, and I am so drunk, at least I don't have to look at his face, I need only look at his shirt front."

[Q] Playboy: If you stayed at that party, what made you decide to leave the closing-night party for Small Craft Warnings---before it began?

[A] Williams: I thought it would be sad, and it would be better without me. The night before we closed, in the part of the play where someone asks Doc how it went at Treasure Island when he returns from performing an abortion there, I blurted out, "Not as bad as it will go at the New Theater next week if they bring in Nelly Coward!" [Williams' play closed to make room for the musical revue Oh Coward!---Ed.] They should have kept it running: it was just building. It wasn't Doc, the part I played, but Quentin, the homosexual, with whom I identified. You see, Confessional, upon which Small Craft Warnings was based, was written in 1967, and during that period I was under so much sedation that I couldn't feel any surprise, and there seemed to be an increasing sameness and brutality in my personal relations. My life was one as close to oblivion as I could make it. Like Quentin, I had quite lost the capacity for astonishment, and the lack of variation and surprise in sexual relations spreads into other areas of sensibility. Quentin's long speech [about being an aging homosexual---Ed.] was the very heart of my life, you know? Though, of course, Quentin's sexual aberration was never mine---I would never reject a person because he returned my touch, you know? I love being touched.

[Q] Playboy: Do you now feel capable of astonishment and surprise---in every area?

[A] Williams: Oh, yes, yes. Except my physical energy is low. I don't feel psychologically jaded; I'm just a little enervated from the effort of acting, you know? We received a funny cable from some theater manager in Australia, who said. "We have been approached about Mr. Williams' touring Australia in Small Craft Warnings. We are fully acquainted with Mr. Williams' abilities as a playwright, but we know nothing about his abilities as an actor. Can you give us some information?" My agent said, "How shall I reply to them?" I said, "Just say forget it, man." I want to see kangaroos, but not that bad.

[Q] Playboy: Besides Quentin, with what other characters of yours do you identify?

[A] Williams: All of them---that is my gift. Alma of Summer and Smoke is my favorite---because I came out so late and so did Alma, and she had the greatest struggle, you know? Blanche in Streetcar was at it like knives from the time of the death of her husband, fucking those soldiers at camp. She had to expiate for feeling responsible for killing him. When he told her about his relations with an older man, she called him disgusting; then she just went out and solved her problems with a continuous orgy. I didn't even masturbate until I was 27. I only had spontaneous orgasms and wet dreams. But I was never frigid like Miss Alma, not even now, when I most need it. But Miss Alma grew up in the shadow of the rectory, and so did I. Her love was intense but too late. Her man fell in love with someone else and Miss Alma turned to a life of profligacy. I've been profligate, but, being a puritan, I naturally tend to exaggerate guilt. But I'm not a typical homosexual. I can identify completely with Blanche---we are both hysterics---with Alma and even with Stanley, though I did have trouble with some of the butch characters. If you understand schizophrenics, I'm not really a dual creature; but I can understand the tenderness of women and the lust and libido of the male, which are, unfortunately, too seldom combined in women. That's why I seek out the androgynous, so I can get both. I couldn't have raped Blanche, as Stanley did. I've never raped anybody in my life. I've been raped, yes, by a goddamn Mexican, and I screamed like a banshee and couldn't sit for a week. And once a handsome beachboy, very powerful, swam up on a raft, and he raped me in his beach shack. I had a very attractive ass and people kept wanting to fuck me that way, but I can't stand it. I'm not built for it and I have no anal eroticism.

[Q] Playboy: What do you mean by seeking out the androgynous?

[A] Williams: I mean I'm only attracted to androgynous males, like Garbo. Ha! After a few drinks, I can't distinguish between the two. I find women much more interesting than men, but I'm afraid to try to fuck women now. I find sexual excitement in women, but I can't complete the act with them. By completing the act I don't mean oral copulation. I'm just as anxious to feel a woman's ass and embrace and kiss her and enter her as I am a boy.

[Q] Playboy: Why are you afraid to go through with it?

[A] Williams: Because women aren't as likely as the androgynous male to give you sexual reassurance. With a boy who has the androgynous quality in spirit, like a poet, the thing is more spiritual. I need that. And the other, too; I always want my member to enter the body of the sexual partner. I'm an aggressive person, I want to give, and I think it should be reciprocal. It's wonderful when they do and you do---let's face it.

[Q] Playboy: But isn't that somewhat contradictory------

[A] Williams: I am contradictory, baby.

[Q] Playboy: What we mean is that women can certainly reciprocate as well as men, be equally spiritual, and there is the obvious physiological advantage.

[A] Williams: Unfortunately, I cannot combine the two. Until I was 28, I was attracted to girls, but after that I fell in love with a man and felt it was better for me as a writer, for it meant freedom. If I were saddled with a wife and family to support---and I'd have had several wives by this time---it'd be disastrous. Oh, I'm very lucky that I've had women in my life, as I can write about both sexes equally well. I've loved them very deeply, but I'm shy of women sexually. I'm shy of men sexually. I'm very moral. I think it's most likely I'll go back to a woman in the end. Women have always been my deepest emotional root; anyone who's read my writings knows that. But I've never had any feeling of sexual security---except with my longtime secretary Frank Merlo, who served me as I had to be served. He both loved and hated me for it. I've always been terrified of impotence, even when I was very young, and Frank and Bette cured me of it.

[Q] Playboy: Bette?

[A] Williams: Bette was the only woman with whom I ever had a fully realized sexual affair. We were at the University of Iowa together. It lasted three and a half months---and then I found that androgynous boys could give me more. And as an artist, I was better off with a boy because I couldn't afford a girl. But at bottom, it doesn't make a goddamn bit of difference who you go to bed with, as long as there's love. I can't get it up without love. Sex is so much an integral part of my work that I must talk about it---but sex isn't the center of my life. Love is a great deal if you can get it, but my work is everything.

[Q] Playboy: Did you ever have any kind of sexual contact with another woman?

[A] Williams: Yes. My great female love was a girl named Hazel from St. Louis. But she was frigid. She'd make me count to ten before she'd let me kiss her; we were both 11 when we met and we were sweethearts until she was in college. She said, "Tom, we're much too young to think about these things." But I constantly thought about sex. In fact, the first time I had a spontaneous ejaculation was when I put my arm around Hazel on a river boat in St. Louis. She had on a sleeveless dress and I put my arm about her and stroked her bare shoulder and I had on white-flannel pants and I came, and we couldn't go on dancing. She didn't say anything about it. She was such a dear girl, but I couldn't be as close to her as she needed me to be. I can be a bitch. I was busy with someone else, and so I failed her. I was wise to her---her frigidity, her need---but I couldn't admit her to my life again. Hazel and I both went on pills and liquor. She married another man but killed herself when she was still very young.

[Q] Playboy: When was your first homosexual encounter?

[A] Williams: In college I was deeply in love with my roommate, "Green Eyes," but neither of us knew what to do about it. If he came to my bed, I'd say, "What do you want?" I was so puritanical I wouldn't permit him to kiss me. But he could just touch my arm and I'd come. Nothing planned, just spontaneous orgasms. The only sex we were exposed to was with dreadful old whores with cunts like diseased orchids. But my first real encounter was in New Orleans at a New Year's Eve party during World War Two. A very handsome paratrooper climbed up to my grilled veranda and said, "Come down to my place," and I did, and he said, "Would you like a sunlamp treatment?" and I said, "Fine," and I got under one and he proceeded to do me. That was my coming out and I enjoyed it.

[Q] Playboy: Is that how you lost your virginity---or did you really make it with Bette?

[A] Williams: Oh, Bette and I really did it. I was in my late 20s---a shockingly advanced age. I wasn't very virile, I was just terribly oversexed, baby, and terribly repressed. As I said, I had had orgasms before, but not through penetration of another person's body. And I never masturbated until one year before I lost my virginity. I didn't know what such a thing was. Well, I'd heard of it, but it never occurred to me to practice it.

[Q] Playboy: Was there a moment in your life when you decided to commit yourself to one sex or the other?

[A] Williams: No, no. I never thought much in those terms, and I still don't. I'm either in love or not in love. Oh, I've had casual adventures, yes. But, as I said, I don't think there can be truly satisfactory sex without love, even if it's only a one-night stand.

[Q] Playboy: Do you consider yourself promiscuous?

[A] Williams: Decidedly not. I feel right now I'm trying to meet my work, and I don't have energy for both work and sex at the moment. I see you don't believe that statement. Well, I have many people spending the night with me, because I like a companion at night; the people at the Hotel Elysée in New York think I'm terrible. But I go mad at night. I can't be alone, because I have this fear of dying alone. But they're usually there just for the ceremony of the dropping of the sleeping pill. Every night I take a hot bath and I have a massage if there's someone around who's any good at it.

[Q] Playboy: Still, could you live and work long without sex?

[A] Williams: I don't want to live without sex. I need to be touched and held and embraced. I need human contact. I need sexual contact. But at my age, one becomes terrified of impotence. I no longer feel I have the power I had. The problem is to find a partner who won't demand it of you but will offer it when the time is suitable. A really gifted sexual partner can give you complete potency if he wants to---or can deprive you of it totally. So many people just like to tease, you know. Age bothers me only in this area; at my age, one never knows whether one is being used as an easy mark or if there is a true response. But I do know that I shall never cease to be sensual---even on my deathbed. If the doctor is young and handsome, I shall draw him into my arms.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't it true that until 1970, you never talked openly about your homosexuality?

[A] Williams: That's right. David Frost had me on his show and asked me point-blank if I were homosexual. I was very embarrassed. I said, "I cover the waterfront." He called a station break, mercifully, and I said, "I should think you would." And the audience gave me an ovation. Then Rex Reed went into the subject in Esquire. But the Atlantic piece upset me the most. This man came to Key West as a guest, but he stayed to eavesdrop on the terribly vulnerable privacy of a man struggling to recover from a long breakdown---me. It was malicious, distorted and libelous by venomous implication. I became socially ostracized in Key West. People drove past my house screaming. "Faggot!"

But I don't care what anyone knows about me anymore. I just don't give a shit, which gives me a new sense of freedom. I have a reputation for immorality, but I know that I'm the most goddamn fucking puritan that ever was. And I'll never give up my house in Key West. Key West once had the most beautiful people I've ever met in my life, mostly blacks---before Howard Johnson and the Ramada Inns arrived. When the two races integrate, we shall have the most physically and spiritually beautiful race in the world, but it will take at least 150 years. Key West is still the favorite of my three homes. I want to die there.

[Q] Playboy: Are you afraid of death?

[A] Williams: Who isn't? I've almost died so many times, but I didn't die because I didn't really want to. I don't think I shall die while I'm happy. I think I can delay death. I don't spend much time thinking about it, though. I've even become rather accustomed to those panicky little heart attacks that I have at times. I've had them most of my life, and how many of them were strictly of nervous origin, I don't know. Of course, if a person with a bad heart gets too agitated, that could trigger an attack, so you have to avoid such circumstances. I have always suffered from claustrophobia and fear of suffocation. It's why I travel first-class. And for a long time, I couldn't walk down a street unless I could see a bar---not because I wanted a drink but because I wanted the security of knowing it was there.

I think a lot of my work has dealt with death. I have a preoccupation at times with death and a preoccupation with sensuality---well, with a number of things. I wouldn't say that death is my main theme. Loneliness is. But I do find it difficult to accustom myself to the death of friends. Unfortunately, most of my close friends are dead. I have a few surviving ones, but not many. I've lost most of them in the last few years, you know? Frank, Diana Barrymore, Carson McCullers, all the doomed people. We did seem to flock together, didn't we?

[Q] Playboy: Have you striven consciously for a kind of immortality, as some writers do?

[A] Williams: Oh, heavens, I've never given it a thought. I just don't want to be a total has-been during my lifetime. That's what I try to avoid, mostly by hard work, baby.

[Q] Playboy: You said you'd almost died many times. How?

[A] Williams: I can't understand why anyone would give a damn about the sex life or the sicknesses of a tired old man.

[Q] Playboy: For one thing, you're not just any old man; you're not even old. For another, both may be organic to your work.

[A] Williams: Oh, all right, then. The Sixties were the worst time for me. At the beginning of one play, Camino Real, I quoted Dante: "In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost." I didn't know then what a prophet I was. The Sixties were no good for me even from the beginning, from Night of the Iguana on; everything went to pieces for me. I told Gore Vidal that I didn't remember a thing about the Sixties---that I thought I had slept through them. And he said, "Don't worry, you didn't miss a thing." First Frank was taken sick and I didn't know it. It was a harrowing illness and it manifested itself in erratic behavior. I think he went on hard-core-drug stuff, and you try to hide that, you know.

Frank was probably the greatest person I've ever known. He died so nobly. It was 1963 and we had a small apartment on East 65th Street. He was entering the terminal stage of lung cancer, and I moved into the study and he took the master bedroom. Fortunately, I had this huge sofa, which I slept on quite comfortably, except that I would hear him all night being racked with his cough and I would keep wanting to go in there and see if he were all right. I was so afraid he would hemorrhage like my grandmother. She died of a hemorrhage. But I couldn't, because he kept his door locked. He didn't want anyone near him. He was like a cat---they withdraw when they're dying. Well, Frank did not die alone, though Atlantic said I was so frightened of death that I deserted him on his deathbed, which is a malicious lie that infuriated me. Frank was very happy to have me there. But the only person he wanted in the room with him was little Gigi, our sprightly bull terrier, and in the morning they would emerge from the bedroom and she would trot at his heels. And they would sit side by side watching television. She would pretend to be watching, too.

I was with Frank the day of his death. The poor boy was put in a ward with patients who had just had brain-cancer operations, brain-tumor operations, and if you've ever seen people who've just had that operation, they're appalling to look at, you know. Their mouths are unnaturally swollen, their eyes are popping, they're sort of vegetables. And I begged him to go to a private room. I said, "Frank, you mustn't be surrounded with this," and he said, "How could it matter to me now?" And then he pointed to little cups of bloody sputum all along his bedside table. He knew he was going to go. But finally they did move him to a private room and he was down there gasping for breath. It seemed to me to be at least half an hour before they brought his oxygen to him; hospitals can be so callous. He never voiced any complaint. He never said. "I'm so frightened." But he wouldn't stay in bed. He kept getting up and staggering over to a chair. He'd sit in the chair a minute and then he'd stagger back to the bed. I asked him, "Frank, why won't you stay in one place?" He said, "I'm just so restless today, I've had so many visitors." I said, "Frank, would you like me to go?" And he said, "Oh, no, I'm used to you." And then he died.

[Q] Playboy: The press always referred to Frank as your secretary. What was your true relationship?

[A] Williams: Once, when I was working on a screenplay in Hollywood, Jack Warner said to Frank, "And what do you do?" Without a moment's hesitation, he said, in his quiet way, "I sleep with Mr. Williams." Frank would also put me down like a prize shit when I deserved it, and I often did. One loved him for it. He taught me life. He was my great male lover.

[Q] Playboy: Did your decline begin with his death?

[A] Williams: That wasn't the beginning, no. My professional decline began after Iguana. As a matter of fact, I never got a good review after 1961. I suppose it might make an interesting story to say that my breakdown was related to one person's death, but it's not true. I was broken as much by repeated failures in the theater as by Frank's death. Everything went wrong. My life---private and professional---and ultimately my mind broke. But it came back---I trust it's partly back. I must say, I still have periods of hysterical behavior, but then I always have had. I do think I'm in my right mind now. I feel no pain anymore, just morning sickness.

[Q] Playboy: You mentioned bad reviews. Are you particularly sensitive to criticism of your work?

[A] Williams: Reviews can be devastating to me. A barrage of bad reviews contributed enormously to my demoralization. The plays weren't that bad---Slapstick Tragedy and Kingdom of Earth and In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel and The Seven Descents of Myrtle and The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, in which Hermione Baddeley got fabulous reviews. I don't think the play worked out sufficiently well, but I've seen worse plays do much better. Walter Kerr dismissed Gnadiges Fräulein in one line. He said, "Mr. Williams should not attempt black comedy." I'd never heard of black comedy, though I'd been writing it all my life.

During that period, I was abandoned by friends to a large extent. People ceased to think of me as an existing person. I was, you know, a sort of apparition. I was only interested in work and I had just three sexual experiences in four years, which I think was certainly unhealthy. I'm sure I was more depressed than I was aware of being, but when you're under sedation constantly, except when you're working, then things don't bother you terribly. A depression, you know, can easily be obscured by drugs. I think most people who take drugs are covering up depression.

[Q] Playboy: What finally precipitated your breakdown? Was the critical disaster of In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel in 1969 the last straw?

[A] Williams: Yes. Time, which is usually kind to me, said it was more deserving of a coroner's report than a review. I was not amused. The reviewers were intolerant of my attempt to write in a freer way. Life said I was finished, and its obituary was reproduced in The New York Times. I ran off to Japan with Anne Meacham, who starred in the play, to escape the brutality of the critics. But I couldn't escape. I began washing the pills down with liquor and I just went out of my mind. I took sedation every night, and every morning I took something related to speed, so that I could still write. Finally I returned to Key West, and one morning I was preparing coffee at the stove and I was staggering about from the synergistic effect of the pills and liquor, you know. I was falling a great deal in the Sixties. Anyway, I got the boiling coffee off the stove and then I fell and it spilled all over my right shoulder---I was naked---and it gave me very severe burns.

It's almost the last thing I remember before they committed me to the loony bin, except when I was in a doctor's office and he was bandaging my shoulder. And the next thing I knew, my brother Dakin was in town and we were at the airport; and next I was in the basement of the house in St. Louis with a bottle and Dakin had brought me a typewriter and I couldn't hit any of the right keys, and I told him the typewriter was no good and he said. "Tom, you really must check into the hospital now." And I said, "No, I've decided not to. I'll be all right; I'll go back to Key West." So there was a great deal of discussion about that, you know.

But finally I conceded that I would go to the hospital, provided they would send an ambulance for me. Well, Mother said this was ridiculous---it would just alarm the neighbors---and so it turned out that my brother drove me over. I spent one day there in a very deluxe ward watching television programs. I was so demented that all the programs seemed to be directed personally at me---isn't that fantastic? Even Shirley Booth's little program, Hazel. I thought Shirley was making veiled innuendoes about me, and then all of a sudden my brother came in grinning with a bunch of flowers and some crayon pictures drawn by his children, and in came Momma, and I said, "I'm leaving here at once." And they said, "Oh, no, Tom. In fact, you're being transferred to another section." And I said, "Oh, no I'm not." So I rushed into the closet and somehow got into my clothes and I rushed down into an elevator and noticed a horrible intern---sort of an albino creature, you know---towering over me, and every time I pressed the down button, he would shove the doors open with this great arm of his. I just couldn't escape. And so finally I ran back to my room and I said, "You must get me out of this nuthouse." I was panicky. And my mother sort of pretended to be having a faint. She said, "Oh, some smelling salts, please," and was going into a swoon, a Southern swoon.

By this time, my mind was quite clear. The shock of the situation had cleared my senses and so I started toward the door again, thinking I would go down the fire escape or something, and there was this goon squad with a wheelchair and they pushed me to the violent ward. I had my little flight bag, containing my pills and my liquor, with me and the last thing I remember is their snatching it from me as I was wheeled into the violent ward. The rest was just a series of wild hallucinations until, I don't know how much later, I woke up and my brother was there and he said, "They say you nearly died. By the way, did you know you had a silent coronary?" I had had three heart attacks while I was having convulsions. I don't know why it was necessary to tell me, but then, Dakin acts by obscure impulses. It's hard to hate him, though; he has a great deal of humor and I think he's one of the great eccentrics of our time.

Anyway, my incarceration in the bin was nothing less than an attempt at legal assassination. I've never cracked up again---I'm too scared to. I'm never going back to the bin. A physician there loathed me and refused to attend me. He was one of the most evil men I've ever known, a monster. The idea of not seeing a patient who had brain convulsions and a coronary is shocking. Eventually, I came under the care of three neurologists who were supposed to be eminent but weren't. Undue risks were taken with my life; I lost 30 pounds and nearly died. Well, that was the end of my long death wish. Now I want to live. That's the main trouble with Key West: I can't get a doctor there. Last year I fell into a fish pond and cut my back and broke a rib and no doctor would see me for a week. I had to call my doctor in New Orleans. He said, "Take two aspirins," and I said, "I'm allergic to aspirin!" But I had a fever and took them anyway and I was soon cured.

[Q] Playboy: Last year a story was published that you had breast cancer and had gone to Bangkok to die. What was that all about?

[A] Williams: If I were going to die, I would have been in Rome. I didn't have cancer, I had an old gynecomastia, a swelling in the breast that comes from the liver, from having too much to drink. Of course, I've imagined I've had cancer for 20 years. But that was all shit. A military surgeon in Bangkok completely removed the swelling. I have large pectoral muscles from swimming all my life, so it wasn't easy---in fact, it was quite painful, as the anesthesia wore off before he had finished. He said. "Don't worry about your chest, worry about your fucking liver." So I've cut down to drinking mostly wine, with an infrequent vodka martini and a little rum in my tea.

[Q] Playboy: What's your latest malady, real or imagined?

[A] Williams: Well, last summer I had to leave the play when I got thrown from a horse in Montauk. I was riding with a young surfer and we kept leaping over arroyos in the woods. A horse is something I should stay off of because of a chronic hemorrhoid condition. Anyway, after falling I developed a thrombosis and gangrene. The pain was affecting my heart because of my chronic cardiac condition. Everything about me is chronic. Bill Barnes, my agent, booked me into Doctors Hospital and got me the best doctors available. He was like Florence Nightingale. They told me they had to operate. I knew that I was doomed, of course, all those surgeons in their dreadful green gowns. The 15 minutes before I went under were the longest of my life. And while I was there, I got hooked on Demerol. I love it, but it didn't kill the pain. Anyway, I recovered and I went straight back into Small Craft Warnings.

[Q] Playboy: How did you happen to make the switch of agents to Barnes from the formidable Audrey Wood, who had represented you from the first?

[A] Williams: That is a very touchy subject, because, for one thing, she and Bill are still good friends. I suppose the last straw was when Two Character Play, the one I've rewritten as Out Cry, was about to go on in Chicago, in July 1971. Audrey left the day before the play opened, and she wasn't too private in the way she left. There were even rumors that I had attacked her. A Chicago newsman who hates me said I was beating her and I had threatened to jump out the window. An actress friend compounded it by saying to me, "You may not betray confidences, but you do betray friends." But Audrey's behavior was atrocious. She has the sympathy of the theater establishment, but they don't know the facts.

[Q] Playboy: What are the facts?

[A] Williams: I only said to her, "You've never wanted this play to succeed." And she simply walked out on me. I was just having my usual opening-night nerves.

[Q] Playboy: Why did you change the title of the play to Out Cry?

[A] Williams: It fits so perfectly. I had to cry out, and I did. It's the only possible title. At one point, the actress cries out, "Out, out, human out cry." It's about two people who are afraid to go out. "To play with fear is to play with fire," one of them says, and the other replies, "No, fear is worse...." It's a history of what I went through in the Sixties transmuted into the predicament of a brother and a sister. But in its earlier versions, people were either bored with it or didn't know what it was all about. Claudia Cassidy came out of retirement to review it and she loved it, and that kept it running. I think Out Cry is my most beautiful play since Streetcar, and I've never stopped working on it. I think it's a major work. I don't know whether or not it will be received as one. It is a cri de coeur, but then all creative work, all life, in a sense, is a cri de coeur. But the critics will say I am excessively personal and I pity myself.

[Q] Playboy: Can't you forget about the critics?

[A] Williams: I've forgotten about them, baby. I wish they'd forget about me.

[Q] Playboy: It's clear that you haven't. And certainly they won't.

[A] Williams: Umm, I suppose. I hope I'll never become one of those querulous old writers who go after critics. I shall never answer them. It does no good to criticize the critics. But it's true that sometimes I think they are out to get me; it's an American syndrome. They knock you down with all the ammunition they've got, and they've got plenty. They've got all that power. They pretend they don't, but they know they do, and they love it. Everybody loves power. They want to try to judge you on traditional form when you're trying to move to something freer, like presentational theater, when you depart from realism and put style on the presentation itself---as Tom O'Horgan does so well. The critics still want me to be a poetic realist, and I never was. All my great characters are larger than life, not realistic. In order to capture the quality of life in two and a half hours, everything has to be concentrated, intensified. You must catch life in moments of crisis, moments of electric confrontation. In reality, life is very slow. Onstage, you have only from 8:40 to 11:05 to get a lifetime of living across.

But the personal criticism of me is no better than the criticism of my plays. Some members of the press are still virulently against the outspokenly sensual person. I shall not name them, but they are significantly influential. One of them said I wasn't the sort of person one would take to dinner---that I didn't mind telling people I was an octoroon. Ho! I had just announced to some stuffy, small-minded people that I was an octoroon and I hoped they didn't mind. But I'm not white trash; one of my ancestors on my father's side was a scout for the Choctaw and Cherokee. Fortunately, there are also a great many people who don't think of me as a bum; a lot of them think of me as Tennessee Ernie Ford!

[Q] Playboy: How does your public image differ from the private person?

[A] Williams: I think the theater public has an image of me that has very little relation to the truth. I think that I come on very open and corn-pone and hearty and all that, but I'm really a very private person---in a profession where privacy cannot be practiced very easily. But I must say this is a little hypocritical, because I really don't like to practice privacy now. I enjoy being a public figure, more or less. I like people recognizing me and saying hello to me on the street, as they do since I've taken up acting. I think I would miss it if people suddenly didn't know me or talk about me. And I don't mean getting the right table in the right restaurant, either; I don't go to Sardi's because I'm always so afraid they'll send me upstairs. And Elaine's seats me only out of sheer compassion for my condition.

[Q] Playboy: You are certainly more visible now than you used to be. Some critics have said that you seem to be implicitly begging for mercy, in a rash of newspaper and TV interviews.

[A] Williams: I have simply emerged, after that long period of deep depression when I didn't care if I was alive or dead. I am living again and I am glad to be alive and I've been happy to go on TV or anything. I suspect it has always been an instinctive thing with me, when being interviewed, to ham it up and be fairly outrageous in order to provide good copy. Why? I have a need to convince the world that I still exist and to make this fact a matter of public interest and amusement. I'm such a ham, you know. Kim Stanley once said to me, "There are actors and there are hams, baby, and I hope you know what you are." I could be a screen actor if the part fit me. My appearance on the Oscar show last year was by invitation of the Academy, and I was delighted to attend. I wanted to get the point across that I haven't forgotten what it feels like to receive a public award, one that's presented to you by the official arbiters of excellence in that field of creative work in which you serve.

[Q] Playboy: Did you have George C. Scott in mind when you said you didn't understand how certain artists of truly pre-eminent power can deny their admirers the pleasure of expressing that admiration?

[A] Williams: Certainly. But also, I said I understand his conscientious reluctance to make of himself a public endorsement of the dangerous principle of competition, especially when he is, sometimes justifiably, skeptical of the values and methods by which winners are selected.

[Q] Playboy: We understand you had to cut your Oscar address extensively before presenting it.

[A] Williams: It was much too long. Have you ever known a Southerner who wasn't long-winded? I mean, a Southerner not afflicted with terminal asthma?

[Q] Playboy: What were your feelings about Charlie Chaplin's appearance that night?

[A] Williams: I think he exhibited that forgiveness and that proud humility of spirit that characterize only the greatest of original and lasting artists, by returning to the locality that once chose to exile him, to receive so graciously an apology so long delayed for so petty an offense, based on ludicrous assumptions. I would call his gesture one of those rare and beautiful things that still can and do occur in the human heart.

[Q] Playboy: Over the years, you've spent some time in Hollywood. How did you first land there?

[A] Williams: In 1943, I was ushering at Broadway's Strand Theater for $17 a week. The attraction was Casablanca and for several months I was able to catch Dooley Wilson singing As Time Goes By. Anyway, one day Audrey Wood informed me I had been sold to MGM for the unheard-of sum of $250 a week. But I had to write a screenplay based on a dreadful novel for Miss Lana Turner---who couldn't act her way out of her form-fitting cashmeres. The producer, Pandro Berman, came back at me with the script and said, "She can't understand such literate dialog," although I had avoided any language that was at all eclectic. They used exactly two lines of mine. Then they asked me to do a screenplay for Margaret O'Brien and I threw in the sponge. Margaret O'Brien! I'm allergic to child actors and I said, I can't possibly write for her for any amount of money. For the next six months, even when I wasn't working, I'd go in once a week just to collect my pay check. I'd never seen such money, and I was able to live on half of it and bank the rest. I rather enjoyed it, and I was able to write The Glass Menagerie then.

[Q] Playboy: Who were your friends in Hollywood?

[A] Williams: My oldest friend on the Coast is Christopher Isherwood; I met Thomas Mann through him. Gavin Lambert is another old friend out there. But Mae West is the only movie star I went out of my way to meet. I just wanted to pay my respects. I told her that she was one of the three greatest talents ever to come out of the movies, the other two being W. C. Fields and Chaplin. She said, "Umm, well, I don't know about Fields."

[Q] Playboy: Your own plays and movies have been filled with beautiful and famous people. Did any of them become friends, or were they important to your life in any way?

[A] Williams: I was always very shy with actors. They all liked Frank very much, however, and he formed a sort of bond between me and the actors, made it easier for us to have contact. I see Michael York and his wife, Pat; Michael is a charming, charming young man, but to me his importance is that of a great actor. Maureen Stapleton became a good friend; she is a genius. I saw Gerry Page the other day and she looked a mess; she's let herself go so and her house was a rat's nest. People like Brando and Paul Newman I merely saw after performances when I dropped in to congratulate them in their dressing rooms. When I'm in Rome, I see Anna Magnani.

[Q] Playboy: She was once quoted as saying she wanted to marry you.

[A] Williams: Well, she was saved. I don't think she ever really thought she was in any danger of it. Besides, I like delicate breasts.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have any other favorites?

[A] Williams: I'm always after Maggie Leighton to star in my plays; she can do anything. And I loved Vivien Leigh. She had this grace. Then there was Tallulah: She was never dull, but she could be tiring. It's too bad she destroyed herself so quickly. But one could never accuse her of sweetness, exactly. When they revived Streetcar, she pissed on my play. She said to me, looking like a frightened animal, "I'm afraid it wasn't the greatest Blanche you've ever seen." I said, "No, in fact, it was the worst." She just nodded her head very sadly. All the drag queens were out there screaming; she was a riot. But she did quite an amazing job of controlling the faggots; whenever there were lines they'd scream at, she'd draw herself up and try to shut them off. Being a natural camp, it was difficult for her to cut down on it, but she did try. In any case, being at bottom too much of a lady, she wasn't right for the part. For Blanche, an actress has got to be a bit of a bum. And during the second production of Milk Train, Tallulah no longer had enough strength to project her voice. It was her last appearance on Broadway.

When she visited me in Key West, she raved over Leonzia, my cook, and asked if she might go back to the kitchen, thank her and tell her I didn't deserve her. She said, "Oh, you divine treasure, I've never tasted such divine food in my life, you beautiful creature, you're too great to be here." Then she came back into the room and said, "That goddamn cook is the ugliest nigger God ever put guts into." Then she would announce that she was going to take a suppository and, whatever it was, she would just turn into a zombie and pass out on the floor.

[Q] Playboy: Did you ever have an affair with any of these stars?

[A] Williams: I'm not about to allow myself to be turned on by my actors sexually, because it would interfere with the professional thing. I don't approve of a playwright or a director or a producer using actors as sexual objects. I've been to bed with the assistant stage manager, yes, but that was long before he became assistant stage manager. I'm overly puritanical in this respect. I realize that many directors have gotten fabulous performances out of actors because they've slept with them.

[Q] Playboy: Which of the films that have been based on your works did you like best?

[A] Williams: I liked A Streetcar Named Desire and I liked Baby Doll, both of which I wrote for the screen. I also liked The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, from my novel, and Sweet Bird of Youth, which was probably better than the play. Though Glass Menagerie may be my best play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is still my favorite. But I hated the movie. I don't think the movie had the purity of the play. It was jazzed up, hoked up a bit. I OKed Burl Ives after he read one line, but Elizabeth Taylor was never my idea of Maggie the Cat.

[Q] Playboy: It's been said that you had an extremely hard time writing Streetcar, that it "possessed" you.

[A] Williams: I worked on it on and off for three years or more. I thought it was too big for the theater. Its subjects had not been dealt with before. It was Blanche, this lascivious, demonic woman, who possessed me. Streetcar contained just about everything but sadism---which is about the only form of sex of which I disapprove. Cruelty may be the only sin. The rape of Blanche was not sadistic, however, but a natural male retaliation. Stanley said of Blanche, "We've had this date with each other from the beginning," and he meant it. He had to prove his dominance over this woman in the only way he knew how.

[Q] Playboy: Richard Harris once said he thought that all the great performances Brando might have given after Streetcar were buried in the files of his psychiatrist---a judgment that has fortunately since been disproved. But do you feel that psychiatry can dissipate the creative impulse?

[A] Williams: Potentially, it's possible. I never saw any decline in the quality of Brando's acting, but I thought he was terribly ill-advised in his choice of certain screen vehicles that were not worthy of his great talent.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever been in psychoanalysis?

[A] Williams: I've gone to analysts only at periods when it was absolutely necessary, and they did help me. I don't feel they've hurt my work; after all, you spend 50 minutes just rambling away about anything to them. Writers are paranoid, because they're living two lives---their creative life, which they are most protective of, and their life as a human being. They have to protect both lives. I put a premium on the creative life. One risks one's personal life in order to work, and when one cannot work, or when one expects total failure, there is a crisis. In one such crisis, I went to Dr. Lawrence Kubie, who said I'd written nothing but violent melodramas because of the violence of the times. He told me to break up with Frank, whom I suspected was a heroin addict. Kubie thought I should be heterosexual. He was a strict Freudian. He was a divine man, but I wouldn't break up with Frank, of course, so I broke up with Kubie. Besides, if I got rid of my demons, I'd lose my angels.

There are times in your life, though, when you reach such a peak of crisis that you have to go to a shrink. But even he can't finally solve it. He just gets you through it. Kubie would imitate my father and scream at me---to break the doors down, you know. What he gave me was not forgettable. I actually learned to respect my father, and now that he's dead, I love the old son of a bitch. But I wouldn't get within a mile of a shrink now, if I could help it. I don't even think I'll have another nervous breakdown. I'll become hysterical, but I won't crack. It's a good release to be hysterical---like having an orgasm.

[Q] Playboy: Why do you feel you won't have another breakdown, after so many in the past?

[A] Williams: Because I don't allow myself to feel constant disappointment anymore. I don't hate myself habitually. I try to recognize my limitations and to content myself with what I'm able to do. It's all very banal: I order my coffee and juice and it comes immediately and then I go straight to the typewriter and don't stop until noon. I usually have several things going at once; I can switch to anything.

[Q] Playboy: Have any other writers exerted a special influence on your work?

[A] Williams: The only ones of which I am conscious are Chekhov and D. H. Lawrence. I greatly admire Rimbaud and I love Rilke. Gide always seemed a bit prissy to me. Proust I admire enormously, but he wasn't an influence. Hemingway was, without any question, the greatest; he had a poet's feeling for words, economy. Fitzgerald's early books I thought were shit---I couldn't finish Gatsby---but I read Tender Is the Night several times. There are very few writers I can stand; isn't that awful? But I'm mad about Jane Bowles and Joan Didion and, of course, I like the Southern writers, Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers, a very dear friend who was the only person I could ever write in the same room with. We used to read Hart Crane's poems to each other. Miss Didion's first novel, Run River, is good writing, but it begins with a murder and I'm always suspicious of anything that begins with a murder. It's like beginning a novel with fucking your mother---where do you go from that? So I never finished it. But I think Play It As It Lays is masterful.

[Q] Playboy: What about your friends Gore Vidal and Truman Capote?

[A] Williams: Friends? Baby, with friends like that.... Once I was about to go to Ischia with Truman and his good friend Jack Dunphy, who's a much better writer than Truman; his Friends and Vague Lovers is a better book than anything Truman could ever dream of writing. Anyway, Truman said to me, "Anne Jackson tells me that when Margo Jones was directing Summer and Smoke, she said, 'Baby, we're doing a play by a dying man. We've got to give it all we've got.' " So I didn't go to Ischia with him. Gore and I were friendly until Two Sisters came out; he said that with the passage of time, I had gone mad.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think that trucking around with the Beautiful People, as Capote does, harms one's work?

[A] Williams: No, I don't think it harms it at all. I think that very likely, in Truman's case, it enhances his work. Like Proust, he might find these people a source of creative stimulation. And he says nothing about these people that isn't humanly interesting. Some of them have tremendous charm and cultivation.

[Q] Playboy: Would you like to live as he does?

[A] Williams: No, I've never wanted a house in Beverly Hills or in Palm Springs, like Truman. I've never wanted to live on the piazza, like Gore. I've never wanted a big villa, never wanted a yacht. I've never wanted a Cadillac. In fact, I don't want any car at all. I used to get panicky on the California freeways. I always carried a little flask with me and, if I forgot it, I would go into panic. When I need a car, I rent a car.

Oh, there are certain things necessary for me. I travel around a great deal and I arrive exhausted. I need someone to help me with my luggage, and my agent sees that I have someone to meet me. It's not so much a matter of luxury as it is making it possible to get around. I like certain fine restaurants like Galatoire's and the Plaza because I can take my sister there and they know her and they are acquainted with all her little idiosyncrasies, like sometimes she will receive the Coca-Cola she ordered and she will say, "Oh, mercy, this Coke has gin in it." And they laugh. They don't mind at all. She'll make me taste it and I'll say, "I'm sure it has no gin, Rose," and she'll drink it. She's terrified of alcoholic spirits; my mother drilled it into her, you know, that they were wicked.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't you once write an essay saying that success and security were a kind of death to an artist?

[A] Williams: Yes, after Glass Menagerie, which made me an instant celebrity, I just shut out the world and came to suspect everyone in it, including myself, of hypocrisy. Though I think I am less inclined to hypocrisy than anyone I know. I think hypocrisy is something imposed upon all of us. Maybe it's just exercise of a certain propriety. I wouldn't call it wearing a mask so much as, upon occasion, one must just behave in a manner that is not precisely instinctual. But my public self, that artifice of mirrors, has ceased to exist and I have learned that the heart of man, his body and his brain are forged in a white-hot furnace for the purpose of conflict. That struggle for me is creation. Luxury is the wolf at the door and its fangs are the vanities and conceits germinated by success. When an artist learns this, he knows where the dangers lie. Without deprivation and struggle, there is no salvation and I am just a sword cutting daisies.

[Q] Playboy: Aren't you making the job of creation tougher for yourself by spending so much time eating in posh places with stylish people and drinking more than one should drink?

[A] Williams: No, I think I'm making it easier. After some four hours of work every morning seven days a week, you try to spend the rest of your time as pleasantly as possible. I swim at the New York Athletic Club, which I'm not too fond of---or perhaps they're not very fond of me; they gave me hell on the gay thing. If I were a duck, I'd be swimming in Central Park. In New Orleans and Key West, I have my own pools. But I feel very depressed if I don't work during the day, every day.

[Q] Playboy: Being a Catholic, do you take time out for Mass or confession?

[A] Williams: I would love confessionals if I could get up at that time, but writing is a confessional, and I feel that I confess everything in these interviews. What is there left to say? My brother Dakin had me converted to Catholicism when he thought I was dying; it did me no harm. I've always been very religious; I was religious as an Episcopalian and I'm still religious as a Catholic, although I do not subscribe to a great many of the things you are supposed to subscribe to, like the belief in individual immortality. Nor in the infallibility of Popes. I think Popes are among the most fallible people on earth, so this is heresy, isn't it? And yet I love the poetry of the Church. I love to go into either a high Anglican service or a Roman Catholic service. And I love to receive communion, but I'm usually working Sunday morning---so I take communion at funerals.

[Q] Playboy: Is your Catholicism unconventional in any other respects?

[A] Williams: Well, I wouldn't care for extreme unction at my death, because if they came at you with it, you'd know that you'd had it. And I believe in contraception of every kind. Anybody who doesn't oppose the population explosion is out of his mind. Overpopulation ruins the ecology of all life. Any candidate who will not admit he's for abortion is frightened. I think a politician should say only what he believes and not equivocate, as McGovern tried to do.

[Q] Playboy: You supported McGovern, didn't you?

[A] Williams: Yes, I was one of the few people outside Massachusetts who thought that Nixon didn't have a chance. This horrid war has eroded the whole fabric of American life, incontestably. The destruction in America of the ideal of beauty is one of the most apparent and depressing things of all and devolves on the man who's ruling this country. I think that when you prosecute an immoral war for so many years---a war that is disgraceful in that it pits such a powerful nation against such a pitifully underprivileged people ---then morality is destroyed for the whole country. And that is why I was so strongly for McGovern. I wish that I could have been of some service.

I am bored with movements, however. The gay libs' public displays are so vulgar they defeat their purpose. When women invade a stag bar, it's ridiculous. Fantastic transvestites in open convertibles making absolute asses of themselves are only hurting their cause---ridiculing homosexuality. I've never belonged to any party, but I think there will eventually have to be some form of socialism in this country, with its size and numbers and variety. I had lunch with Yevtushenko at the Plaza and he said that I would be a millionaire in Russia and I said, "I'd rather be poor in America, baby." He had been to see Small Craft Warnings and he said that I had put only 30 percent of my talent into that play and I said, "Isn't it remarkable that I put that much into it?" The bill for lunch ran into three pages. There was barely room to sign it. I told him, "You're a capitalist pig."

[Q] Playboy: You're pretty well off yourself, aren't you?

[A] Williams: Everybody coaxes me into talking about how wealthy I am. My royalties mostly come from abroad, foreign productions, you know, and they add up. I have houses, too, and a considerable amount of stocks. I don't even know their value, though, so I don't know my worth precisely. But it's not as much as President Nixon's, who lists his property alone as $800,000. When I asked my lawyer what my estate amounts to, she said the exact amount of money is not what you're worth, it's your work.

[Q] Playboy: Speaking of which, you said recently that you regard yourself as a failed artist, that you don't think you could ever do another major play, that what is left is just a sort of coda for your work. Why?

[A] Williams: I've had moments of depression in which I've said such things, no doubt. But Out Cry is a major play, as I've said. This morning I wrote the best fucking scene since 1961, baby. And I shall write stories, I suppose, as long as I see and feel them. I tend to see and hear my plays and stories before I write them; I hear the mad music of my characters. But I don't think any piece of work is ever what one wishes it to be, or that one's completed works ever fulfill one's potential.

[Q] Playboy: What do you feel are your greatest gifts---and your greatest limitations?

[A] Williams: I'm strongest on characterization, dialog, use of language. And I do have a sense of what is theater, I believe. Oh, but weaknesses, I have so many. When we were first reading Sweet Bird, I jumped up and said, "Stop it at once. It's dreadfully overwritten." If things are powerfully directed and acted, however, the purple writing becomes true. My greatest weaknesses are structural. And I overdo symbols; they're the natural language of drama, but I use them excessively. I'm also inclined to be overly introspective, but I don't know how to avoid it. I am an introspective person. I don't like writing that doesn't come deeply from the person, isn't deeply revealing of the person.

[Q] Playboy: When your life story is filmed from the memoirs you've written, who will play Tennessee Williams?

[A] Williams: Let me see, who's the handsomest young actor around? Michael York? Marjoe is quite charming---he has everything Billy Graham doesn't. Victor, my houseboy in New Orleans, breaks my heart---isn't he beautiful?---but he can't act.

[Q] Playboy: So we're back to sex. Do you believe that, in the final analysis, a man follows his phallus?

[A] Williams: I hope not, baby. I hope he follows his heart, his frightened heart.