Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [219]
Throughout all of this display of emotion, Tennessee sat as motionless and gently smiling as a bronze Buddha, his mind possibly elsewhere, while his diminutive, silent companion—who had eaten all of her dinner and a good deal of his—stuffed herself on the petits fours. Tennessee’s eyes were glassy. I wondered if he had prepared for the evening by taking Ritalin, the virtues of which he had preached to me once but for which he was a poor advertisement.
At last, the moment came for Tennessee himself to speak. With unfeigned shyness he stayed in his seat while everybody else—except the woman sitting next to him—rose to their feet applauding and calling for him to speak. Tennessee blushed modestly and finally rose to his feet, swaying slightly. He waved for silence, and, as the room grew still, he leaned toward the microphone. In his musical Southern drawl, enunciating very slowly, even hesitantly, but by no means quietly, he said: “I would like to introduce you all to mah beloved sister, Rose …” He paused to indicate the small woman seated beside him, who seemed to be totally unaware of the fact that he was talking about her. Tennessee smiled down at her, his expression full of sympathy but somehow puckish. He took a deep breath and went on: “… who had the first pre-frontal lobotomy in the state of Alabama.”
With that, he sat down, still smiling benevolently. The room remained hushed while everybody contemplated this bombshell. Rose herself smiled on, as vacantly as ever, while the rest of us waited for Tennessee to say something—anything—else. But he did not.
A lady from the National Arts Club seated next to me gave a loud, disapproving snort. “I told everybody we should have given the award to Arthur Miller,” she said angrily. “At least he’d have made a decent acceptance speech.”
ECCENTRIC BEHAVIOR is par for the course among writers of genius, most of whom are solitary people who only come up for air for brief periods between books, at which point they are often embarrassingly determined to be the life of the party and the center of attention until the typewriter reclaims their attention, but Tennessee was a playwright, quite a different creature, and although he liked to present himself to strangers as a shy and diffident country boy in the big city, a kind of gay Huck Finn, he was in fact, like most playwrights, intensely social, for playwrights, unlike poets and novelists, are partners in a process that involves many other people, some of them with even bigger or more fragile egos than the playwright’s own, such as stars, directors, producers, and investors. Tennessee knew everybody from Jackie Onassis down, had been everywhere, was at home everywhere, and usually seemed to know everybody’s secrets, for he had an insatiable appetite for good gossip and was a brilliant raconteur. What was not so immediately apparent was the steel behind the charming, if eccentric, facade. A stranger, looking at Tennessee’s life, might easily have concluded that Tennessee had given up writing, for his life seemed to revolve around drinking, making telephone calls, and going to endless parties, but somehow, in the middle of the uncontrolled chaos that was his life, Tennessee somehow always found time to write—indeed, for a man in poor health who had a drinking problem and who took a witch’s brew of pills, his productivity was amazing, even alarming. I came to the conclusion that while he liked the chaos that surrounded him, he was somehow able to take refuge within his head. Every time I went over to see him in his dark, crowded, book-filled little suite—which looked as if it had not been cleaned or tidied since the days when Tallulah Bankhead lived there—I could not help noticing that Tennessee was seldom alone. There were always bottles and unwashed glasses everywhere, and often from the tiny kitchen came the noise of some unseen person, banging and crashing amid the china and