From Tom to Tennessee

On the frigid December night in 1944 that The Glass Menagerie premiered in Chicago, the woman who originated the role of Amanda Wingfield, Laurette Taylor, came face-to-face with the woman who had inspired the character. “Well, Ms. Williams,” asked Taylor, “how did you like yourself?” Edwina Dakin Williams, ever the Southern belle, politely changed the subject, “Oh, Laurette, you were wonderful.”

This freezing Chicago night catapulted Amanda Wingfield to the pantheon of great roles for actresses, and also made a star of Tennessee Williams, who had used his early years in St. Louis as a source of inspiration for the play. With his fame grew the myth of his domineering mother, and Edwina Williams has become inseparable from the character she inspired. Likewise, The Glass Menagerie is often seen as a snapshot of Williams’s life, with Tennessee as Tom Wingfield and his sister, Rose Williams, as Laura. But these comparisons can do the play a disservice; Williams certainly used his own experiences as a framework for the play, but The Glass Menagerie represents Williams’s dramatic manifesto, his first wholly successful attempt to transmute life into art.

Tennessee Williams’s life begins like a Tennessee Williams play. Edwina Dakin, who prided herself on being the “only Southern girl from Ohio” and harbored hopes of becoming an actress, fell in love with Cornelius Coffin Williams, a travelling salesman from Memphis, in 1907. Although he was a playboy who loved whiskey and a good poker game, Cornelius managed to win over Edwina (triumphing over several other suitors) and her parents, the Reverend and Mrs. Walter Dakin. After the marriage, Cornelius was often on the road, leaving his children to enjoy the indulgence and undivided attention of their mother.

When Cornelius obtained a permanent position with the International Shoe Company, he moved his family to St. Louis in the brutally hot summer of 1918. The Williams children had few friends, as Edwina disapproved of many of the neighborhood children, and their classmates mocked their Southern accents. Poetry served as a refuge for Tom, but Rose, though vivacious and pretty, struggled to adjust and became withdrawn, often fighting with her parents. Cornelius ignored his daughter, and Edwina criticized her daughter’s growing interest in boys, clothes, and parties. When Tom enrolled at the University of Missouri in 1929, Rose was left alone.

While at “Ole Mizzou” Tom discovered the work of D.H. Lawrence and Shelley and, encouraged by his drama professor, wrote his first play. Cornelius pulled strings to get his son accepted to Alpha Tau Omega, and his fraternity brothers remembered Tom as quiet and quirky, although popular with girls as a dance partner. Jim Connor, the inspiration for Menagerie’s Gentleman Caller and Tom’s closest friend at the time, later recalled that Tom spent much of his time writing.

The beginning of 1932 found Tom trapped in the Celotex interior of International Shoe. Upset over his son’s poor grades, Cornelius secured him a job as a clerk, forcing Tom out of college. Tom chafed at the job, recalling later that the three years he spent in the warehouse felt like the same day played over and over again. He ultimately found release in 1935 after heart palpitations caused a nervous breakdown. This incident inaugurated a lifelong fear of dying and madness that Williams would see reflected in Rose. After a disappointing social debut, she had begun experiencing unexplained stomach pains. The night of the breakdown that saved her brother from International Shoe, Rose wandered into his room and declared that Tom, Rose, and their younger brother Dakin “should all die together.”

While Tom recovered in Memphis, Rose began seeing a therapist, who diagnosed her pains as stemming from a fear of sex. Edwina Williams subsequently orchestrated a parade of gentleman callers. Tom returned to St. Louis and enrolled in Washington University, where he met poet Clark Mills McBurney and began writing “social plays” for the Mummers, a St. Louis theater troupe. Tom’s success with the Mummers and friendships with the young literati of St. Louis strained his relationship with his sister. He criticized Rose to her face and in his diaries, calling her habit of wearing negligees in the house and her desperate behavior toward men disgusting. Rose, ignored by the brother who had formerly been her most loving companion, slipped further into her delusions. Cornelius and Edwina admitted her to a sanitarium in 1937, after which Cornelius gave his daughter up as a lost cause. Tom, already afraid that he, too, would go mad, had a nervous attack upon visiting her, and after a brief visit in 1939, wouldn’t see his sister again until 1943.

Tom finally completed his college studies with the prestigious University of Iowa playwriting program. One play, Not About Nightingales, revolved around a war-torn family crushed by poverty, and another, Me, Vashya! featured a heroine driven mad by her blood-thirsty arms dealer husband. Though both deal with the major social problems of the day—The Depression and looming war—both show a young playwright struggling to depict the private tragedy of a family unfolding against a larger societal tragedy.

Eager to take flight from St. Louis, Tom decamped to New Orleans in 1939 and along the way became Tennessee Williams. He mailed several plays to the Group Theatre’s new play contest, knocking three years off his age to qualify for entry and impulsively signing the works “Tennessee.” The plays won him $100, enough to support himself through his writing, and the patronage of Audrey Wood, a powerful New York literary agent.

The next five years in Williams’s life were a restless whirl of travelling and writing. His notebooks and diaries of this period are part portrait of the artist as a young man, part pillowbook, and part travelogue. “Okay again. Writing really good scenes. Sex ok,” reads a typical entry. Williams’s wanderlust carried him across the country through New Orleans, Florida, Georgia, Hollywood, and New York.

Despite Tennessee’s stated desire to break away from his family, the Williamses bled into his work. Williams wrote stories about brothers and sisters, drafting Apt. F, 3rd Flo. So., set in a white room like Rose Williams’s St. Louis room; If You Breathe, It Breaks about a “front porch girl” with two brothers who refuses her mother’s offer of gentleman callers; The Spinning Song, which deals with a decaying Southern family that contains seeds of both The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire; and The Purification, a verse play about an incestuous relationship between siblings.

In these stories, the kinship between the brother and sister represents the divide Williams saw in himself between the artist and the lunatic. In his sister, Williams saw a mind ravaged by what he called “blue devils,” which had turned their father into a drunk and threatened to destroy the young writer’s own mind. Writing became his salvation. A diary entry from Williams’s time in Macon, Georgia showed his determination to overcome this shadow of madness: “I have to consider my family and their love and be brave and enduring as long as it is humanly possible… messy and prolonged. What happened to my sister.” Without writing to save him, Williams feared his mind would fail as had his sister’s.

The Glass Menagerie frequently receded in Williams’s priorities as he worked on Battle of Angels, Camino Real, You Touched Me! and a cavalcade of poems and short stories. It surged ahead in January of 1943, when Edwina broke the news that Rose had undergone a prefrontal lobotomy to pacify her delusions. A devastated Williams returned to St. Louis; Edwina Williams thought her son never forgave her for the decision, which doctors had assured her was the best way to treat Rose’s diagnosed schizophrenia.

What playwright and Williams expert Tony Kushner calls “ur-Menageries” began to take shape during this period. Williams first tried a short story, Portrait of a Girl in Glass, in which Laura is the central character and has no physical defects. The unnamed mother is a charming nag, but lacks the force of Amanda Wingfield. Tennessee called the story “dismal,” and abandoned it to pen Daughter of the American Revolution: A Dramatic Portrait of An American Mother (A Comedy). Infused with Edwina’s Southern mannerisms, this Amanda hawks magazine subscriptions to genteel Christian ladies. Audrey Wood and Williams agreed that the mother was the strongest character of these disparate drafts, but Williams’s thoughts kept returning to Laura.

These embryonic drafts led to The Gentleman Caller, which Williams adapted into a film treatment for MGM during the summer of 1943. In this version, Tom Wingfield and Amanda gain primacy, Laura is made lame, and the role of the Gentleman Caller is expanded. Tennessee assured Wood that he would soften the ending of the film to make it palatable to the Hollywood starlets who may fill the role of Laura. This soft ending can be seen in The Pretty Trap, a one-act in which Jim, single and charmed by Laura’s strange beauty, invites her out for a walk at the end of the play. The curtain falls on a triumphant Amanda, who gives her son her blessing to leave his family.

When the film studio dismissed Williams’s treatment, he finished his stage version of The Glass Menagerie. Williams accidentally left the manuscript in the dorm room of a Harvard student he had hoped to seduce, but the student kindly mailed it back to him. The play finally made its way to his agent, Audrey Wood, in the autumn of 1943. (She was horrified that Williams sent his only copy through the post; he replied that if the play were lost, he could just rewrite it.) The play was then picked up by Chicago producer Eddie Dowling. The former stage-star Laurette Taylor insisted she play Amanda, and the cast began rehearsals in Chicago in December 1944. Taylor frustrated the cast by mumbling and appearing uninterested in rehearsals. When Tennessee admonished her—“My God, what corn!”—she threw herself into the role full force, moving Williams and Julie Haydon, who played Laura, to tears. Taylor had been biding her time studying the other actors’ performances; Williams loved her performance so much that he allowed Dowling to cut the screens and slide projections indicated in the script in order to focus on the power of the performances. After a successful Chicago run, the play opened on Broadway in March 1945.

From the life and memory of Tom Williams, Tennessee Williams had created one of the most enduring portraits of a family ever staged. Although Tom Wingfield runs from his memories, Tennessee Williams used his own past to create something never before seen on the American stage—a lyricism born of truth, in the pleasant disguise of illusion.

Alexandra Juckno is a first-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./ Moscow Art Theater School Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University.