Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

As an eighteen-year-old student in the Music Department of the University of Texas College of Fine Arts in Austin, I attracted the overpowering attention of a Texas fireball named Jones who’d revised her given name from Margaret into Margo (in fact née Margaret Virginia Jones in little Livingston, Texas), whose dominant, in fact totally consuming passion focussed on theater, especially what she called regional theater: she loathed the term “Little Theater” applied to many such groups, customarily composed of stage-struck amateurs, many of them far less gifted than they hopefully thought, not to say so downright bad they could make a fastidious seat-holder’s toes curl.  Googling has belatedly revealed to me that Margo almost certainly lied to all of us about her age - approximately a decade my senior, for an almost virginal teenager a difficult, not to say an impossible situation. 

In addition to a very few other people, Margo numbered among the authentic “discoverers” of Thomas Lanier Williams - who’d revised his own given names into Tennessee, a nickname he’d acquired during his student days at the University of Iowa, which he’d chosen because of its Drama Department.  Margo had done yeoman (yeowoman, yeoperson…?) work in founding and running the Houston Community Players until World War II drafted all her men in the early 1940s and she had no alternative but to close it down.  She already had a fairly widespread reputation, especially in Texas, and she immediately found a new home as a member of the Drama Department faculty in Austin.

The word “enthusiast” best fit Margo; to coin a phrase, she could have sold refrigerators to Eskimos.  Tennessee Williams, whom I met through her, dubbed her “The Texas Tornado”.  Austin’s College of Fine Arts comprised Art, Music, and Drama, and its organist Dean William Doty required every Fine Arts major to take a one-semester course in the appreciation of the two other departments to supplement the student’s major.  Thus at eighteen I landed in the Drama Appreciation course taught by Margo - incidentally almost certainly the only faculty member in Austin whom the students, like everybody else, including the town’s taxi drivers, most of whom knew her from her near-addiction to taxis, called by her first name.

Already during her Houston years she’d made an annual trip to New York, to catch the best of current Broadway fare and pick the brains of a few literary agents whose judgment she respected.  I’ll never forget her passionate enthusiasm when she came back to Austin during the 1942/43 term carrying several typescripts by “a wonderful new playwright called Tennessee Williams.”  Prior to that trip, her heart had belonged completely to William Saroyan, who’d made a sensational splash when the actor-producer Eddie Dowling produced and starred in one of his numerous early plays (Saroyan, an ethnically 100% Armenian California, turned out new plays like an expert restaurant chef shelling peas) called The Time of Your Life.  (How many fellow codgers reading this can even remember Saroyan?  Last time he came to my own attention he’d settled in Paris, where he got a shoestring income from writing a column for the Paris edition of The New York Herald Tribune.)  Many a time we all heard Margo’s wish-fulfilment declaration “I’m going to marry him” - although she’d never yet even met him.

Those early Williams scripts, entrusted to her by the ace literary agent Audrey Wood, included the only collaboration of his I know of, You Touched Me!  Another aspiring writer, Donald Windham, had introduced Tennessee to the D. H. Lawrence short story with that title; Windham thought it had potential as a play, and when Tennessee concurred, they jointly turned it into a full-length play.  (Eventually, largely on the success of The Glass Menagerie, which came first, it had a short run on Broadway, with the newcomer Montgomery Clift and the English veteran Edmund Gwinn in the leading roles.)  Audrey Wood, who made little secret of the fact that she regarded Williams as her No. 1 protégé, had wangled a Rockefeller Foundation grant for him some years earlier; when that ran out, another wave of her wand got him a beginning writer’s contract with mighty Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Hollywood; there he pulled down $250 a week - galley-slave money by Hollywood standards, but far more than he’d ever earned at the various odd jobs he’d previously tried his hopelessly inept hand at. 

During his servitude at Metro, which he predictably loathed (he referred to one assignment imposed upon him by the Front Office as “Lana Turner’s Celluloid Brassière”), Margo Jones also turned up in La-La Land, invited by another regional-theater pioneer, Gilmor Brown, to give You Touched Me! its world-premiere production at his almost unique Pasadena Playhouse.

During that summer, Margo and Tennessee saw a lot of each other, and she showered me back in Austin attending summer school with frequent letters, as often as not bringing me up to date on what she and Tennessee had done together in the meantime.  In one letter she enclosed the longhand original of a poem he’d dashed off during one Sunday brunch she’d invited him to at the furnished apartment she’d rented.  Later she told me Tennessee had suddenly excused himself from the table, nipped into the kitchen, and sat down to put onto paper the nostalgic lyric his brain had just produced. 

Tennessee’s early benefactors also included James Laughlin, the literarily inclined multimillionaire heir to a sizable chunk of Pittsburgh’s Jones-Laughlin Steel fortune, who’d founded the adventurous, even avant-garde publishing house he called New Directions.  After I emerged from UT Austin as a freshly baked Bachelor Musicae and set out to dazzle New York as the answer to Vladimir Horowitz, I fairly frequently saw Tennessee, who lived in a Manhattan YMCA room in the West 60s, primarily because he could swim there every day for free.  (When hysterical paralysis during his profoundly traumatic earlier St. Louis days had for a while left him partially lame, his physician told him he would have to exercise every day for the rest of his life - which he almost religiously did.) 

Jay Laughlin and his wife made their home in a fashionable Connecticut township, but alone he came into Manhattan frequently and after Tennessee introduced us took a bit of a shine to me as possibly a future New Directions author.  The books he published appeared with surprising frequency, and several of them he sent to me as gifts.  One he entitled Five Young American Poets, with one of the five Tennessee Williams - as I recall, Tennessee’s official first burst into print.  Those poems included one he called “Mornings on Bourbon Street” - but in, so to speak, a slightly closeted version: he’d written the original in the first person, but for publication he’d concealed himself behind a third-person camouflage.  My sincere thanks to Steve Schwartz, long familiar to me as an email buddy I always thought of as The Sage of New Orleans, whom Hurricane Katrina blew all the way to Austin, Texas, where he kindly tracked down this poem in the excellent U.T. library and emailed it to me. I’ll return to 10 Wms. (as he sometimes whimsically signed himself) here at a later date, for we saw quite a bit of each other in New York in between his M-G-M period and the tremendous success and fame The Glass Menagerie brought him overnight, but for the moment, as an affectionate gesture of reminiscent tribute, I offer that poem here the way Tennessee originally wrote it:

MORNINGS ON BOURBON STREET

I knew I would say it.  But could I believe it again?

I thought of the innocent mornings on Bourbon Street, of the sunny courtyard and the iron lion’s head on the door.

I thought of the quality light could not be expected to have again after rain,

the pigeons and drunkards coming together from under the same stone arches, to move again in the sun’s faint mumble of benediction with faint surprise.

I thought of the tall iron horseman before the Cabildo, tipping his hat so gallantly towards old wharves, the mist of the river beginning to climb about him.

I thought of the rotten-sweet odor of Old Quarter had, so much like a warning of what I would have to learn.

I thought of belief and the gradual loss of belief and the piercing together of something like it again.

But, oh, how my blood had almost turned in color when once, in response to a sudden call from a window, I stopped on a curbstone and first thought,

Love.  Love.  Love.

I knew he would say it.  But could I believe it again?

I thought of Irene whose body was offered at night behind the cathedral, whose outspoken pictures were hung outdoors, in the public square, as brutal as knuckles smashed into grinning faces.

I thought of the merchant sailor who wrote of the sea, haltingly, with a huge power locked in a halting tongue –

Lost in a tanker off the Florida coast, the locked and virginal power burned in oil.

I thought of the opulent antique dealers on Royal whose tables of rosewood gleamed as blood under lamps.

I thought of my friends.

I thought of my lost companions, of all I had touched and all whose touch I had known.

I wept for remembrance.

But when I had finished weeping, I washed my face, I smiled at my face in the mirror, preparing to say to you, whom I was expecting:

Love.  Love.  Love.

But could I believe it again?