Tennessee Williams arrives on the Queen Mary, August 12, 1948. (AP)
Born on March 26, 1911, Tennessee Williams began to hone his playwrighting craft at the University of Missouri from 1929-32. After Williams died on Feb. 25, 1983, University of Missouri journalism student Greg Garrison, now a reporter at AL.com, began interviewing former Mizzou students who knew the aspiring playwright when he was a college student. This story originally appeared in the Columbia Missourian.
"Shy freshman writes romantic love tales for many magazines," read the headline above an article in a 1929 issue of the University of Missouri campus newspaper.
Readers were told that stories by the University of Missouri freshman had been published in Weird Tales and Smart Set magazines, then briefly described the aspiring author.
"It bothers Mr. Williams to have anyone ask him questions about himself. He is little more than five feet tall. He has clean cut features and smooth brown hair. His eyes, which have a look that seems thousands of miles away, add to the unapproachable and reserved appearance which he presents. He is equally as reticent and shy as he appears and feels that his having stories published is nothing out of the ordinary...
"He intends to enter the School of Journalism of the University and to be a journalist after his graduation from college."
Instead, Thomas Lanier Williams dropped out of school in 1932 after his junior year. For nearly 40 years, he would dominate American theater as "Tennessee Williams." But to friends such as Esmeralda Mayes Treen, Elmer Lower and Guy Tourney, he would always be Tom.
Treen, who moved to Sussnex, Wisconsin after college, grew up in the same St. Louis neighborhood as Williams. She met him in 1922 through a mutual friend, Hazel Kramer, Williams' childhood sweetheart. Born March 26, 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi, Williams had moved with his family to St. Louis in 1918. Treen described Williams at age 11 as small, and short for his age.
"Tom was very shy," said Treen, who received a degree from the University of Missouri in journalism in 1934. "When he was embarrassed, he giggled."
Still undersized and introverted, he arrived at the University of Missouri in 1929. For several months, he lived at Effie's Boardinghouse, near the journalism school. Treen recalls it was a most awful place, but in his memoirs Williams called it a pleasant arrangement. Williams described Effie as a very lively middle-aged landlady, a widow with a bright red Buick convertible.
Despite Effie's obvious charms, Williams quickly decided that life in the boarding house wasn't for him. "A non-frat man is practically 'out of it' in Columbia, as I have found in the past month," he wrote in a letter to his parents. Shortly after being visited by representatives of Alpha Tau Omega, he pledged the fraternity. But it wasn't long before he was looking back nostalgically on his days at Effie's.
"He was the butt of a lot of jokes," said Elmer Lower, who was an ATO at the time. Later, Lower would serve as the president of ABC News and dean of the University of Missouri School of Journalism.
"The guys used to play tricks on him," Lower recalled in 1984. "Tom would leave his books around, and they would throw his books into the fireplace."
At least they were considerate enough to do it while there wasn't a fire going, Lower added.
Williams brought much of the abuse upon himself, Lower said. Among his frequent transgressions was an irritating habit of borrowing clean shirts to wear to the dinner table, where a dress code was strictly enforced. Such misdeeds made him a regular defendant at the fraternity's weekly midnight kangaroo court.
"In those days," said Dr. Guy Tourney, who became a physician in Quincy, Illinois, "if you didn't do your pledge work, you got paddled."
Williams recalled in his memoirs that he often was sentenced to the maximum punishment: 10 swats.
"There was one time in his first year that I was the one who administered the punishment," said Tourney in a 1984 interview. He said he felt bad then and still regretted having had the duty of paddling the posterior of the future famous playwright.
Tourney weighed only about 120 pounds, but Williams was even smaller.
"He didn't have too much to hit down there," Tourney said.
The Tom Williams recalled by Lower and Tourney sounds like a prototype nerd. But success is the best revenge.
Williams got his, winning international acclaim for his play, "The Glass Menagerie," and Pulitzer Prizes for "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."
Revenge was still years in the future, however.
Completely non-athletic is how Tourney describes Tom Williams. "He didn't do much more than walk," Tourney recalled.
Yet the fraternity forced Williams to participate in intramural wrestling.
He received a bye, said Lower, then went into the finals against a wiry farmboy. On the day of the match, he posted a sign that read:
WILLIAMS ULTIMATUM: LIQUOR! LIQUOR! MUST HAVE LIQUOR FOR MY BOUT WITH THE AGGRESSIVE AGRARIAN.
Despite prohibition, Williams' enterprising fraternity brothers fulfilled his demands.
"We gave him a little bootleg liquor and sent him over," Lower said. "He made a surprisingly good showing."
Williams, who admitted that the reason he was chosen to represent the fraternity was because he was the only ATO small enough to qualify for the 118-poud weight class, later recalled the match:
"I attacked my adversary with great fury. I used activity to conceal my lack of skill. I lost the match."
A loner and an oddball is how Lower remembered Williams. His father sold Red Goose Shoes as a traveling salesman, Lower said, and each time Williams received an allowance check, he would hold it up and shout, "The Red Goose flies again!"
The Red Goose apparently didn't fly often enough or with enough gusto to protect Williams from his propensity for writing bad checks to local eating establishments, whose complaints compounded his problems with the fraternity's kangaroo court.
"Tom wasn't in touch with reality sometimes," Tourney said. "He was a deep thinker."
He also was absent-minded. Perhaps there's poetic justice in the fact that he once flunked an English composition course because he forgot the time of the final examination.
"He was so poor at organizing," Lower said of his puny fraternity brother. "It surprised me he could even complete a play."
Lower recalled that Williams couldn't even remember which color pants to wear for the weekly ROTC march around Francis Quadrangle.
Among the hundreds of cadets in white trousers, Williams was easy to spot in his blue slacks.
"Modest, unassuming, very immature," is how Tourney characterized Williams during that period.
"A little guy, not very athletic, not very good-looking," Lower said. "The girls weren't really taken with him."
At the time, Williams was actively seeking dates with girls.
"Tom didn't have a bold enough front," Tourney said. "He was too shy to ask girls for dates. A few times he told me to get him dates and I said, 'Tom, I don't know the girls any better than you do.'"
Williams apparently had a slightly different perception of his prowess with college women. In his memoirs, he admitted being sexually inexperienced, but recalled the time he raised eyebrows among his fraternity brothers by showing up at a party with a notoriously promiscuous young lady.
In his memoirs, he also recalled the early evolution of his homosexuality. His roommate at the boarding house, a somnambulist, once crawled into bed with Williams. The playwright later wrote that he hoped for a recurrence but it never came. Instead, one of Williams' fraternity roommates eventually became his first lover.
Although the fraternity expelled the aggressor in the homosexual affair, Williams was allowed to stay. Distance didn't cool the affair, however. Williams recalled that the two continued to rendezvous at the apartment of his lover, whom Williams referred to as "Smitty," until Smitty left the university at the end of the year.
Williams hadn't given up altogether on women. Tourney recalled that Williams kept a typewriter in his room and wrote frequently.
"But he never told anybody what he wrote," Tourney said. "He said he was writing poetry. I told him he needed to write some girl material."
Williams dedicated love poems to Anna Jean O'Donnell, one of Treen's sorority sisters in the Alpha Chi Omega house across the street from the ATO.
One of these, "Not Without Knowledge," appeared in the 1932 Savitar yearbook.
It was as a freshman at Mizzou that Williams began to write his first one-act plays. Although both violated entry requirements, "Beauty is the Word" won an honorable mention in the Dramatic Arts Club competition in 1930, and "Hot Milk at Three in the Morning" won the same honor in 1932.
Retired drama professor Donovan Rhynsburger was a member of the committee that judged the competition. But he said in 1984 that he never read Williams' entries because committee chairman Robert Ramsey, then a University English professor, had ruled that the plays didn't follow the form required to facilitate reading.
"Beauty" was described in the campus newspaper as a missionary play with an original and constructive idea. The critic added that the handling was didactic and the dialogue too moralistic, but noted that Williams was the first freshman to win honorable mention in the contest.
"Hot Milk" is about a man who feels trapped by his wife and child in an impoverished life. Williams felt that the theme held promise, and later rewrote it as "Moony's Kid Don't Cry," a television play which appeared April 16, 1958, on NBC's Kraft Theatre.
Contrary to some reports after Williams' death on Feb. 25, 1983, the existence of these plays had been known by the University of Missouri drama department since Williams first achieved critical success with "The Glass Menagerie." The original copies have been kept in Ellis Library's rare books collection since the 1940s.
Rhynsburger rediscovered the plays after the December 1944 opening of "The Glass Menagerie" in Chicago. Mary Robnett, a University of Missouri secretary, had seen the production and gave Rhynsburger the program, which stated that Tennessee Williams had been a student at the University of Missouri.
Rhynsburger found the plays in a file of contest entries.
Within the next decade, both of Williams' original one-act plays would be produced under Rhynsburger's direction by the Missouri Workshop, a student theatre group. Rhynsburger said the students thought it would be interesting to bring to life the plays Williams wrote while at the University of Missouri.
"Beauty" was produced in 1950 and "Hot Milk" was produced after the completion of a new stage in Jesse Hall around 1955.
Speer Morgan, a University of Missouri professor of English and editor of the Missouri Review, was unimpressed by Williams' student efforts. He called both plays examples of juvenilia.
"They came from an immature author," Morgan said. When the plays were published for the first time in the Missouri Review, the preface stated: "These are not good plays by any literary standard."
Morgan said the plays were published in the Review because they offer a peek into the process of Williams' artistic development.
"He didn't change subject matter as much as some authors," Morgan said. "His themes remain stable through most of his work."
Williams' study habits while at the University of Missouri were not so stable. He was apparently preoccupied writing plays and poetry. In his memoirs, Williams wrote: "My grades were good in English and one or two other subjects, but I flunked out of ROTC and got poor grades in other courses."
But it was his father, not the university, who decided he should leave school.
"When I came home, Dad announced that he could no longer afford to keep me in college, and that he was getting me a job in a branch of the International Shoe Company," Williams wrote.
Esmeralda Treen suspects that frustration rather than finances were behind the decision. The family was not poor, she said.
"I think Tom's father could have kept him in school if he wanted to," Treen said.
Cornelius Williams just didn't approve of his son's aspirations.
"He could not see writing as a profession," Treen said. "It was sissified to him. He made fun of Tom to the point where I think Tom grew to hate him."
Edwina Dakin Williams offered another perspective in her book, "Remember Me to Tom," a biography of her son.
Williams' failure to pass ROTC was a major factor in his departure from the University of Missouri, his mother wrote.
Cornelius Williams had attended military school as a boy and had served as a lieutenant in the Spanish-American War. He was outraged when his son failed ROTC, she said.
Williams later would resume his education at Washington University in St. Louis, where he continued writing plays, before finally receiving a bachelor's degree in drama from the University of Iowa in 1938. It wasn't until 1969 that he finally received a degree from the University of Missouri, an honorary doctor of humane letters.
By then he had long been known as "Tennessee," a name he adopted to honor his Southern forebears and to divorce himself from the given name he said he felt had been compromised by the imperfections of his early writing.
Yet when Rhynsburger asked Williams to autograph original copies of the plays he had written as a student, the playwright scrawled "Thomas Lanier Williams" across the front page of each of them.