Tennessee Williams in New Orleans

Cover, Tennessee Williams in the attic of722 Toulouse Street, 1977, by Christopher Harris (1994.143.2); above, 722 Toulouse Street, 1937 or 1938, by Richard Koch (1985.120.141); inset, attic stairs, 1993, by Richard Sexton. In the winter of1939, Tennessee Williams lived in a garret room at this address, now part ofTHNOC's complex ofbuildings. 2 THE BEGINNING OF ACAREER: TENNESSEE WILLIAMS ON TOULOUSE STREET combination of circumstances in room, for which he paid ten dollars a 1938 led Thomas Lanier Williams month, opened onto a dormer window, Ato flee St. Louis and settle in New while the other room with a matching Orleans, a decision that was to prove dormer was occupied by Eloi Bordelon, momentous in shaping his life and his an artist who became a close friend of career. The situation in the Williams the author. Tom wrote to his grandpar home was intolerable for him, living as ents, Rev. and Mrs. Walter Dakin, that he did in close proximity to a father the house was owned and operated by a whose attitude toward his sensitive and "lovely Mississippi lady," but apparently artistic older son was little short of con there were three landladies who had, the tempt, hearing the almost constant bick writer told his mother, seen better days ering of his parents, and watching in and now lived amid their antiques on pained helplessness as his beloved sister the second floor. They were such excel Rose slipped further and further away lent cooks that Williams persuaded them from him into the nightmarish world of to open a restaurant for which he provid her growing hysteria. ed the motto ("Meals for a Quarter in When his attempt to acquire a posi the Quarter") and worked as cashier. tion with the WPA Writers' Project in One of the ladies, a Mrs. Anderson Chicago failed, he headed south in the who, according to Williams, "had a hard hopes of joining Lyle Saxon's WPA team time adjusting herself to the Bohemian in New Orleans. How different his spirit of the Vieux Carre," created havoc Tennessee Williams. Photograph courtesy career might have been had he remained when, after the first floor tenant - a Dorian Major Bennett in Chicago instead of moving to the city photographer - had ignored her which proved to be a liberating factor in complaints about the noise from a party the acquaintance of Rose Bradford, a his life and his work. Edwina Williams he was giving, she poured boiling water guest at the party whose dress was ruined wrote of her son that when he set out on through holes in the floor. She was by the water; she lived with her husband, that journey, "I had the feeling this time, charged with "malicious mischief and dis Roark Bradford, in a creole cottage across in one sense, he was never coming back turbing the peace" and her case was tried the street from the rooming house. to me." Those words proved to be the next night at the Third Precinct police Bradford, the night city editor for the prophetic, in both a real and metaphori station on Chartres Street. Tom Williams, Times-Picayune, had made a name for cal sense, for never again would Tom live when asked by the judge if she had indeed himself writing books in black dialect, at home for long periods of time, and perpetrated the act with which she was including his most popular work, Of' when next he visited his mother, the accused, cleverly evaded the question by Man Adam an' His Chillun (1928), adapt young man was hardly the son who had responding that "I thought it was highly ed by the author and Marc Connolly into left the shelter of her nest. improbable that any lady would do such a the long-running Broadway hit Green It was December 1938 when he thing!" His evasion probably spared his Pastures. The Bradfords, whose home was arrived in the French Quarter and pre being asked to vacate his room, but a gathering place for writers - William sented himself to Colette and Knute embedded within it is certainly a gentle Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, and John Heldner, artists who knew friends of rebuke of what Mrs. Anderson had done. Steinbeck were among those who enjoyed Tom's in Sr. Louis and who graciously The incident produced several their hospitality - introduced Williams gave him shelter. He was their guest until significant results: a similar episode is to Sam Byrd, a visiting producer who, January l , 1939, when he moved into a described in A Streetcar Named Desire, upon hearing that he was an aspiring rooming house at 722 Toulouse Street. A and the pouring of the water and the trial dramatist, volunteered to read some of photograph of the house from the late became climactic scenes in Vieux Carre, his work. Characteristically, Williams '30s shows it in a romantic state of decay, the 1976 memory play in which "had nothing to show him," since he had a stuccoed building with vines growing he recreated the dramatic incidents of sent all his plays to New York and over one corner and a cast-iron second those important months in his life on retained no copies. floor balcony. Williams's third-floor Toulouse Street. In addition, he made If Mrs. Anderson found it difficult 3 to adapt to the "Bohemian" nature of the Quarter, young Tom Williams reveled in it, once he had adjusted himself to the free-wheeling Latin lifestyle there. He professed to having been shocked at a New Year's Eve party to which the Heldners took him, the day before he moved into the room on Toulouse Street, but he was soon to immerse him self in that milieu which had originally surprised him. The freedom the city offered transformed him, and the ten sion between it and what he termed the "Puritanism" of his nature, instilled by early years living in his grandfather's rec tory and the strong influence of Edwina Tennessee Williams in Jackson Square, 1977, by Christopher Harris (1994.143.1) WPA and later became a successful inte story, insisted that because he was rior decorator in New York, quite a con behind in his rent, he had to slide down trast to the portrait of the tubercular sheets to escape the rooming house. artist Nightingale in Vieux Carre. It was Those few months on Toulouse Eloi who introduced Williams to the Street constitute one of the most crucial New Orleans Athletic Club, where the periods in the life of Tennessee dramatist was to swim daily whenever he Williams. He was storing up material was in the city. One indelible impression for later use, and it is here that he set on Ayala's memory involves Mrs. Wire, the story ''Angel in the Alcove," as well one of the landladies at 722 Toulouse - as the one-act "The Lady of Larkspur Wizard, mechanical figure from catalogue it is her name that Williams uses in Lotion" and the late play Vieux Carre, ofthe Musee Mechanique on Royal Street, Vieux Carre - whose parrot would and he used the first name of Eloi around the corner from Williams's rooming perch on the balcony of the second floor Bordelon as the protagonist of the one house in 1939. A similar museum was and call out to men passing in the street act "Auto-Da-Fe." In 1939, the Musee featured in Eccentricities of a Nightingale (84-46-L). below, "Come on up, boys, and have a Mechanique at 523 Royal Street, good time." Tennessee, who was always around the corner from the rooming Williams - a strait-laced southern lady fascinated with birds, particularly par house, was operated by John Henry of the old school who viewed sexuality as rots, surely would have been impressed Hewlett and his wife, the former a flaw in human nature - was to pro by this phenomenon. Lorraine Werlein. The Musee, a collec vide him with dramatic material for Ironically, it was a man named Jim tion of charming mechanical figures work he produced for the rest of his life. Parrott who provided the dramatist an and clockwork pictures, must have Eloi Bordelon's brother, Charles exit from the rooming house and made a strong impression upon the Ayala, recalls that the Quarter in those entrance to the next phase of his life. young playwright, for he retained the days was "like a little community where Described by Tennessee in Vieux Carre memory of this magical place until he everybody knew everybody else," and his as an itinerant saxophonist named Sky, needed it in 1964 for Eccentricities of a memories of the rooming house indicate Parrott stayed briefly at the house Nightingale. Mrs. Winemiller related something of how it must have affected before the two of them left for Texas. the story of Albertine, her sister, who, impressionable yo ung Tom Williams. Parrott, who became a pilot and now is with her husband, Mr. Schwarzkopf, Ayala, who was five at the time, lived retired and living in Florida, recalls owned such a museum and met a tragic with his mother in Algiers, and the two those years in his memoirs, Travels with end, unlike the real-life models. of them would ride the ferry across the Tennessee, part of which has appeared in If the 27-year-old Thomas Lanier river every Sunday to bring Eloi a basket the Tennessee Williams Literary journal. Williams could return to the Vieux of food and clean clothes. At the time, In later years, Tennessee, in what may Carre today and see the Toulouse Street Eloi was working as an artist for the or may not have been an apocryphal house, he would hardly recognize it.

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