Tennessee Williams

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

Speaker 10:05

For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in 1978 and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:31

This week, our castaway is the playwright Tennessee Williams.

Presenter0:35

Let's have the first record you've chosen, mister Williams.

Presenter0:38

The first one is a song I always request of a person with a great tenor voice. It's called O'Danny Boy. And who's the person with a great tenor voice on this occasion? It's uh Harry Belafondi.

Speaker 40:55

Oh, Danny

Speaker 41:00

The pipe

Speaker 41:02

The pipes are calling.

Speaker 41:08

From Glen to Glen.

Speaker 41:14

And down the mountain side.

Presenter1:22

Harry Belafonte singing Danny Boy. Why did you choose that?

Presenter1:27

I don't know it's so lyrical.

Presenter1:31

It it breaks my heart.

Presenter1:34

Does music play a big part in your life? I love to hear it while I'm writing. You know, it uh affects the mood of the writing. I don't listen to it consciously, but it does seep into my consciousness as well. It sort of takes up the slack and helps you to concentrate.

Speaker 11:50

Yeah.

Presenter1:54

was poetry. Do you still think of yourself as a poet?

Presenter1:58

I find I do my best poetry within the context of of play, but I still write poems, yes.

Presenter2:08

You were born in Columbus, Mississippi. When you were about twelve you moved from the south to the midwest. When I was eight, actually. When you were eight. What was your reaction to that? Uh, when uh as if entering a nightmare.

Speaker 12:18

Yeah.

Presenter2:22

Because uh I lived under the gentle influence of my grandparents in uh Mississippi and uh I was suddenly transported to the uh crudity and brutality of St. Louis, where we were suddenly conscious that we were poor. Did you do a great deal of reading, all sorts of reading? There was a year in my life, I think it was uh between seven and eight, when I was confined to the bed most of the time with either uh rheumatic uh fever or diphtheria. The country doctors of that time were not too precise about one's uh maladies.

Presenter3:07

Which writers influenced you most as a as a youngster? I read all of Chekhov at the age of ten. All of all of Shakespeare, I beg your pardon, Shakespeare by the age of ten. Shakespeare first. Then Chekhov became my greatest influence later on. And then you began to express yourself by your own writing so much that you you you flunked at the University of Missouri. I mean, you you were too busy so writing your own I fell in love with a girl named Allegene O'Donnell and I didn't give a damn.

Presenter3:35

So as a result, when you came out of university, you had to go work in industry.

Presenter3:42

Yeah, my father said I'm not going to keep him in school.

Presenter3:46

Uh if he uh makes grades like this. Also, I'd flunked R O T C which particularly offended him. Military training. Yes, yes, we have it too. So you had to go to work in a shoe company? Yes, for three years. Doing what? I did every onerous, ev all of the most onerous tasks that could be imagined by the boss. He couldn't fire me because my father had gotten him his job. You see, the Indian shoe company is composed of many branches and my father was in one and he had gotten this man his job in another. So the man felt he couldn't uh fire me, but he wanted me to quit. So he gave me all these terrible jobs like dusting off uh a thousand or so samples of shoes, you know? And carrying huge sample cases across town. Had you started writing plays?

Presenter4:42

No. I did my first play immediately after that. Yes. In Memphis, Ten C. Why plays? Had had you seen a lot of theatre as a youngster?

Speaker 14:46

And

Presenter4:52

No, I hadn't seen there wasn't much theater in Saint Louis, so the first time I saw a play that deeply, deeply moved me was uh Ghosts, Ibsen's Ghosts with Alan Azimova. Yeah. It uh moved me to the extent that it moved me right out of my seat and I I just couldn't sit still. I had to pace up and down the back aisle.

Presenter5:16

The Peanut Gallery. Now, after that three years in the in the shoe industry, you d you decided that education really was important. You put yourself back into college. My grandmother did.

Presenter5:27

With your approval? Oh, indeed, yes. I wanted to complete my education. And having done that, you spent a few years roaming around the country. Oh, quite a few years. I remember running into the back end of a cow on a bicycle, uh and the bicycle was demolished, but the cow didn't seem to mind too much. And writing while you roamed. There was a time when you went overnight from a seventeen dollar a week job as a as a cinema usher to two hundred and fifty dollars a week on the MGM payroll. That's rather funny, yeah. Uh at that time I had a lovely lady agent uh named Audrey Wood.

Presenter6:11

And uh I was working at the Strand Theater on Broadway, a movie house. They were showing Casablanca, incidentally. And uh one day she called me into her office and she said, um

Presenter6:25

Uh, Tennessee, um, I've got a job for you in Hollywood that pays uh two hundred and fifty dollars. I said, Two hundred and fifty dollars a month I thought that was a huge sum. And she said, You misunderstand me. It it's two hundred and fifty a week.

Speaker 16:44

And me.

Tennessee Williams6:46

Wink.

Presenter6:49

Tell me about working for MGM. You you were in writer's row? Yes, I had a very lovely office. I was put on an impossible assignment, uh writing for um Lana Turner.

Tennessee Williams6:53

Yeah.

Presenter7:02

Who happened to have caught the fancy of the producer, you know. And did you find that difficult to write for her?

Presenter7:11

Well, uh yes, it presented some difficulties because he knew our limits of vocabulary and he said, uh I'm afraid these lines, beautiful as they are, are not quite within a range. And then he offered me a job of writing for Charlestar. Now, I never liked Charles Starr, but I regret to say that. You and W. C. Fields both. Yeah.

Presenter7:35

So you didn't really make a great success at at MGM? No, they didn't renew my option, but uh I saved up quite a bit of money. I lived very frugally, very uh pleasantly.

Presenter7:47

Let's have another record. What shall we have next?

Presenter7:49

Oh, that we two were maying, yes. That's uh one of my uh childhood uh days favorite. You know, it was one of my mother's favorites, my grandmother's. It's a duet by a contralto and a mezzo soprano, I believe.

Tennessee Williams8:14

Oh the faith of the storm.

Tennessee Williams8:18

And we like people saving in the favor of winning.

Tennessee Williams8:40

Uh

Presenter9:07

Oh, that we two were maying Opus two, Number eight, by Nevin, it says here, sung by Alma Gluck and Louise Homer.

Presenter9:17

I'm sorry to say that it was in MGM's time that you wrote the first play that brought you recognition.

Presenter9:25

Well, I've been working on a play before and I've worked on it after and I never submitted it to MGM. That's just um I don't know who invented that story. That was the the Battle of Angels the Glass Menagerie. Glass Menagerie was it? Yeah. I'd already done Battle of Angels which closed disasters.

Tennessee Williams9:37

Okay.

Speaker 19:37

Baz

Tennessee Williams9:38

Glassman Andrew was

Presenter9:46

It um

Presenter9:47

Closed in in in Boston, I believe. In Boston, yeah. So that meant back to routine jobs for for several years more.

Presenter9:55

And then The Glouse Menagerie, that was your first play on Broadway.

Presenter10:00

It was the first uh hit that I had and I gave half of it to my mother, the money, I mean, because uh it was based entirely upon her personality, the other characters were not so closely.

Tennessee Williams10:11

There.

Presenter10:15

Eliminated my father.

Speaker 110:15

A limit

Presenter10:18

A very slight, tender, nostalgic play.

Presenter10:21

Yes. And a a great deal in it o of your sister Rose. Well, my sister Rose had a little more spirit than um than me than Laura Wingfield exposed. Y your empathy wi with with your sister must have been very strong, because there was a sad period in her li young life when she became demented and and your next two successful plays, A Streetcar Named Desire and Summer and Smoke, were both about

Speaker 110:44

Yeah, next to success.

Presenter10:50

Young Southern lady is going through a disturbed patch. Yes, well my sister developed schizophrenia in her middle twenties, yes, after a long period of um badly diagnosed psychosomatic disorders. They were going to perform an exploratory operation on her to find out why she couldn't eat. And then finally the family doctor said, Mrs. Williams, the trouble is that uh you uh are so puritanical and your sister is not a dakin little Williams and she's very highly sexed. I think she that if she's not got a a uh fiancée uh that could be an arranged marriage. My mother screamed like a bench.

Presenter11:36

Now Street Car, of course, w was a breakthrough, probably the most down to earth and unrealistic play to have appeared on the American stage. Did you guess it was going to become a a world wide success? I thought it was going to be a terrible flop. Magnificent performance by the young Marlon Brander.

Presenter11:55

And the girl was the original girl was Jessica Tanran, Jessica Tandra, an English lady.

Presenter12:01

Now your successful plays have as a matter of course been made in into film versions. Have you worked on the screenplays yourself?

Presenter12:09

On several of them, yes. I worked uh on Office Descending. I wrote that for Anna Mignani. I wrote uh The Rose Tattoo for Anna Magnani.

Presenter12:20

And I did a little work on uh the Roman Springer Mrs. Stone, which was um uh written by Gavin Lambert. The screenplay was written by Gavin Lambert. I'd just written the novel. But I wrote one or two scenes, he says. Right. Your third record, watch that.

Presenter12:41

Oh, that's the Beatles. I heard the news today. Oh, boy. Why'd you choose that?

Presenter12:46

Because I've always loved the Beatles and I was very sad when they broke up. I thought they had the most beautiful addiction, and the lyrics uh were um important lyrics. You know, th they said something interesting.

Tennessee Williams13:02

I read the news today, oh boy.

Tennessee Williams13:09

About a lucky man who made the grave

Tennessee Williams13:15

And though the news was rather sad

Tennessee Williams13:21

Well I just have to laugh.

Tennessee Williams13:25

I saw the photograph.

Presenter13:33

A Day in the Life by the Beatles. Now lists are are are boring things, but let's um recite the titles of just one or two more of your successes. The Rose Tattoo, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Night of the Iguana. A very impressive and long list. You admit to being a compulsive writer. You're not really happy unless you're writing, is that true? I feel very, very guilty if a day passes in which I haven't written.

Presenter14:00

Are you disciplined in the hours that you write? Do you like to start at a regular time every day?

Presenter14:06

I like to start immediately when I wake up.

Presenter14:11

In the sixties you had a a very bad patch or a bad breakdown. Did you find writing a kind of therapy or at that time was it? Writing was the one therapy. And strangely people don't recognize that I made some of my most daring departures in writing during that period. Plays like In the Bar for Tokyo Tell. Which we haven't seen over here.

Speaker 114:20

Writing

Presenter14:41

Uh the Gneditches Freud line. Another we haven't seen. Yeah, it was uh part of a double build called Slapstick Tragedy. Uh Kingdom of Earth you have seen in England and the provinces successfully too. And now you brought a new play to London, Via Caray.

Presenter15:00

Um this is an autobiographical piece. The Vieux Carrie, of course, is the old French quarter of New Orleans.

Presenter15:07

And this was your youthful days in a roaming house. This was my entrance into uh that state called uh Bohemia.

Presenter15:17

A state of which you are still a citizen.

Presenter15:20

Uh yes, but I maintain a pre precarious balance between citizenship in Bohemia and in the the world of propriety. Oh, that's nice. I try to. And you still have two or three recent plays as yet unproduced? Oh, yes, three, yeah. Three. Usually that sounds that sounds corny, but it happens to be true, because if you work every day it happens.

Presenter15:46

Record number four.

Presenter15:48

While I was riding streetcar, just around the corner, there was a bar called Victor's, and after work I would go to Victor's to fortify myself with the uh Brandy Alexander. And they had this Ink Spots record on the jukebox, and I would always play that while drinking the Brandy Alexander. In which city was that? New Orleans.

Tennessee Williams16:13

Prayer begin and end.

Tennessee Williams16:17

With just your name

Tennessee Williams16:21

And would I be sure that this is long beyond compare.

Tennessee Williams16:32

Would all this be true if I didn't care for?

Presenter16:43

The Inksput

Presenter16:44

In recent years you've been acting yourself in in Small Craft Warning. Was that a a long cherished ambition? Had you done any acting before?

Presenter16:54

Appallingly, in uh in college in uh at the University of Iowa, I was uh given uh non-speaking parts because uh I just have a vocal freeze, you know, I couldn't get the lines out.

Presenter17:10

They allowed me to appear.

Presenter17:12

And in one part I had one line. Uh I get so nervous that by the time uh I came to that line which is uh so-and-so is at the geet my lord or something like that, I could hardly say it intelligibly and the whole house would come down with laughter. But now you you've got over that and and you did indeed play uh a leading part, you know.

Presenter17:40

Did you? Not at all. I never I was forced into and during the summer months, you know, Theatre Falls in New York and um I was told that uh I could uh by taking over that part I could build up attendance, which I did indeed do and we we got through nearly six months.

Speaker 117:45

Abuse.

Presenter18:09

I'm going to play the part of Soren. That's the invalid uh old brother Madame Macardina in The Seagull, you know? He doesn't have to say too much, he just complains. Where do you g where and when are you going to do that? Whenever I finish my adaptation of The Seagull, which has never been, to my mind, properly translated. Another record. Another record is Elvis Presley's Love Me Tender. I happened to meet Elvis Presley when I took my mother out to Hollywood on a vacation. He was particularly sweet to her.

Speaker 118:18

You don't have to see

Presenter18:48

And she said, Oh, what a charming young man Well, he looked pretty good that time, and showed no sign of dissipation.

Speaker 419:03

Love me tender, love me sweet.

Presenter19:03

Love

Speaker 419:10

Never let me go

Speaker 419:16

You have made my life complete.

Speaker 419:22

And I love you so

Presenter19:27

Elvis Presley, Love Me Tender. Now your plays have obviously given you financial independence. You like to travel the world.

Presenter19:36

You did in fact you had in fact made your first visit to Europe when you were about sixteen. Seventeen.

Presenter19:43

How did that come about? My grandfather conducted uh a tour of Episcopal ladies through um Europe. How many of them? Oh, countless, countless. All mad at each other and tripping each other up in hotel in railway carriages, that sort of thing, you know. It was too laughable for words.

Speaker 119:55

Your father

Presenter20:06

Your grandfather was a was a parson. Episcopal minister, yeah, parson, you might say, yeah. Uh, they call him preacher in Mississippi, but a dearly loved man, a man of great sweetness. And you came to London? We came to London and uh I remember eating in a restaurant that had been uh

Speaker 120:07

A visible menace, yeah.

Tennessee Williams20:13

Yeah.

Presenter20:28

A patronized by Charles Dickens.

Presenter20:31

Now you've known the the London Theatre pretty intimately for getting on for thirty years. What do you think of the state of our theatre now?

Presenter20:39

It's certainly preferable to the New York state of theatre, you think?

Presenter20:44

In my opinion, yes, because you have here you have the Harold Pinter, who is uh the greatest of all contemporary playwrights in my opinion. And uh your actors cannot be equalled in America hardly. Let's move on to your sixth record. It's also a record I associate with New Orleans.

Presenter21:10

Right across from my rental apartments, one of which I occupy occasionally.

Presenter21:16

There was a bar called The Chopping Block, and on their jukebox they had this enchanting record called The Shadow of a Smile, sung by Miss Vaughan.

Tennessee Williams21:31

Oh, and I remember screaming.

Tennessee Williams21:36

All the joy that love can bring I will be remembering the shadow of your smile

Presenter21:57

Sarah Vaughan, The Shadow of Your Smile. Now we've dumped you on this.

Presenter22:02

Sad desert island, Tennessee, how will you stand up to loneliness? Could you endure it?

Presenter22:08

If I had a typewriter and plenty of typing paper, yeah. Right, then that's your luxury, because I was going to give you one luxury on the island. The compulsive writer always. You need that. On the practical side, could you look after yourself? Could you build somewhere to live?

Presenter22:24

That I'm uncertain about. It would have to be, you know, fairly deep in the tropics, uh, where I wouldn't freeze to death. Yes, we'll see. I should like to be able to swim, you know. And you could forage for food and fish? If there were any, uh yeah, I want to call a sailfish, but I was glad when it got away. Would you try to escape? Oh, yes. They'd run out of typing paper eventually, wouldn't they? We'll see, you have enough. Uh, we've got to your last record, but one. What's that going to be? Kirime Mucho.

Speaker 122:33

I should like to be able to swim.

Presenter23:01

Which means love me much.

Presenter23:04

I used to hear it continually in Cuba before the days of Castro. Key West, where I live, is only forty five minutes from Cuba, and I used to go and I would always request the hotel band to play Kirima mucho.

Presenter23:22

Sometimes they would start playing it as soon as they saw me out of the bar. And who sings it?

Presenter23:28

This is is sung here by Tito Schipo, who well, I I never heard anybody that grand sing it, but he sings it well, I believe.

Tennessee Williams23:38

One more second ever

Tennessee Williams23:45

For the heal your king.

Tennessee Williams23:53

It's impossible to miss the at all once or for all.

Presenter24:08

Chiarame Mucho, sung by Tito Skipa, which brings us now to your last record.

Presenter24:14

My last record is uh Judy Garland. I adored Judy Garland, as did everybody, I believe, who knew her. And what does she sing? Me and my shadow.

Tennessee Williams24:29

Cause nobody's there Just me.

Tennessee Williams24:39

And more

Tennessee Williams24:43

Shadow

Tennessee Williams24:48

All alone and feeling.

Presenter24:58

Me and My Shadow by Judy Garland. If you could take just one disc out of the eight that you played us, which would it be?

Presenter25:07

It's hard to choose between Danny Boy and Me and My Shadow by Judy. It's hard to choose.

Presenter25:16

Probably Danny Boy. Danny Boy by Harry Belafonte. Now you've chosen your one luxury, that's your typewriter and and as much paper as you're likely to need. One book, apart from the Bible and Shakespeare, which are already on the island, and we don't allow big encyclopedias. What are you going to choose?

Presenter25:36

The Collected Poems of the American Poet Hart Crane. The Collected Poems of Hart Crane. And thank you, Tennessee Williams, for letting us hear your Desert Island Disc. Thank you so very much. Enjoy it every minute. Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 126:02

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.