Free Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) by Darwin Porter, Danforth Prince

“funeral rites. There went my once fashionable reputation. Never again would I be the darling of the critics. From then on, the mere mention of my name would bring only the most savage of attacks, those that tore at a human heart. I had to be a tough old bird to continue to write plays at this point in my life.”

Chapter Four

    Tennessee & Lana Face Two Faux Clark Gables—James Craig & John Hodiak

    “ I think that is one of the funniest but most embarrassing things that ever happened to me, that I should be expected to produce a suitable vehicle for this actress. I feel like an obstetrician required to successfully deliver a mastodon from a beaver.”
    —Tennessee describing his MGM assignment to write a screenplay for Lana Turner (photo above )
    In time, Hollywood would turn out some memorable films based on the plays of Tennessee Williams. But fame, riches, and glory did not come for him overnight.
    When he first moved to Los Angeles in 1939, Tennessee was desperate for money. The only job he could find was as a feather picker on a squab ranch outside the city limits.
    “My time of dread was when a group of young men, most of them boys, actually, came over three times a week to commit mayhem in a place known as ‘The Killing Shed.’ Here, they would murder the squabs by slitting their throats with sharp knives. The poor birds would frantically twitch as these killers would hold them by their legs over a bucket to bleed them.”
    The slain squabs were then delivered to the feather pickers, who included Tennessee among a group of mostly Mexican co-workers. Tennessee said that after he picked the feathers off a dead squab, he would then drop a feather in a milk bottle with his name on it. He would be paid—“very very little money it was”—based on the number of squabs he’d picked that hot, sweaty, smelly day.
    In the future, if his host ever served him squab, he’d leave the table.
    When he plucked the last feathers of his last squab, he returned to New York. The only job open was a $16-a-week position as an usher at the old Strand Theater on Broadway. “They did nothing but show Casablanca day and night. I learned all of Bogie’s dialogue, then Bergman’s role. I never tired of Dooley Wilson playing that oldie, ‘As Time Goes By.’”
    “Then it came like an electric shock or else a bolt of lightning,” he recalled. “Audrey Wood got in touch to inform me that she’d just ‘sold’ me to MGM in Hollywood. I’d get 250 big ones a month, or so I thought, until she informed me that the $250 was per week. I was overjoyed. Never in my life had I been paid that kind of dough.”
    As the job was originally described to him in New York, he’d been assigned the task of reading a romantic novel, The Sun Is My Undoing . He was to write a scenario for its adaptation to the screen.
    He arrived by train in Los Angeles, getting off at Union Station with David Greggory, a friend of his from New York. Both of them set out to look for a place to live, finding a cheap two-room apartment in the “honky tonk” section of Santa Monica, overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
    “The wallpaper was stained, and the decoration consisted of a plaster model of Mae West—nude, of course,” Tennessee said.
    His half-gypsy landlady, “Jezebel” Ringo, became a literary inspiration for him. In the morning, she fed him red tomatoes from her garden patch outside and also fed him Red propaganda from The Daily Worker . In the afternoon, she lolled about on a raggedy old mattress in the garden beside her tomato patch.
    Young Tennessee in Tinseltown: Plucking Squabs & and Cruising the Palisades

    At night, she was visited by a series of military young men, often two at a time, whom she serviced in her apartment. Her nocturnal pastimes inspired Tennessee later in life to use as the basis for his character of Maxine Faulk in The Night of the Iguana . The role was interpreted on Broadway by a red-wigged Bette Davis and later, on the big