Tennessee Williams - Mad Pilgrim Of The Flesh

Near the end of his life, playwright Tennessee Williams authorized Lyle Leverich to write his biography, but Leverich died before he could finish the second volume. Fortunately, theater scholar John Lahr, who was also in discussions with Williams, was next in line to finish the book. Lahr has delivered with the defining portrait "Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh." Lahr conjures Tenn in all his elusive dimensions.

The book picks up where Leverich left off, the electrifying opening of "The Glass Menagerie" on Broadway, with Williams sweating it out in row six. Then Lahr flashes back over Williams' cyclonic life through the prism of every play - the triumphs - "Streetcar," "Cat," "Iguana," "Summer and Smoke," "Suddenly, Last Summer," et. al., and the equally spectacular failures.

Of course, much of Williams' life and legend is well-trod territory, but Lahr's authoritative and unconventional approach seeks to "map out," he explains, a more flesh and blood portrait, rather than the 'mosaic' of facts presented in several other books that have appeared since Williams' death in 1983.

Williams, a virgin well into his 20s, had to "unlearn repression" to claim his sexual identity and artistic destiny. Williams' private life provided the raw material for all of his plays, and Lahr condenses those elements in concrete terms.

Even if he wasn't publicly "out," he viewed a liberated sex life as saving his sanity and fueling his artistic impulse. As he did with his biography of Joe Orton, Lahr doesn't blanch at any explicit detail and writes with insight, without being lurid, about how sexually adventurous Williams became.

As Williams became more celebrated, success was proving a creative killer. He alternated in luxuriating in the trappings, even as he tried to escape them through booze, globetrotting, sex and drugs.

Lahr is particularly deft in his assessment of the final two decades of his life when the commercial theater was rejecting his work and the press was vilifying him in print. Williams fought on in the theater as part regimen of drug and sex benders to avoid, among other things, intellectual, sexual, and artistic boredom.

Such Broadway and Hollywood luminaries as Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan, Bette Davis, Tallulah Bankhead, Vivien Leigh, Geraldine Page (just to mention a few) populate the book. But just as fascinating is how Lahr details Williams' important relationships with dancer Kip Kiernan, Pancho Gonzalez and particularly poignant, his lover of 14 years, Frank Merlo. Also invaluable are penetrating portraits of Williams torturous relationships with his distant father, his mother Edwina, brother Dakin and tragic sister Rose.

Even though Lahr's dissection of the plays can boil over with academic precision, this is required reading for anyone interested in the theater and especially those keen on pioneering gay literati. Most important, though, 'Mad Pilgrimage' re-calibrates the true theatrical and literary treasures of Williams' life and legacy.

The book is packed with well selected, photos, many previously unpublished.

"Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh"
by John Lahr
W.W.Norton & Co, Inc.
Hardcover, $39.95
www.wwnorton.com