Tennessee Williams’ Women

In September 1982, he got a call from Williams, aged 71. “Perhaps you can be of some help to me,” he told Grissom. Then he invited him to lunch in New Orleans, where Williams had lived off and on for years.

Grissom jotted down the “help” remark in a blue book he had planned to use for a history exam. The next morning, he blew off the test and drove his 1977 Chevy Malibu to New Orleans, meeting Williams at Jackson Square, whence they walked to lunch at The Court of Two Sisters, a meeting that lasted several hours.

Considered one of the foremost playwrights of twentieth-century American drama, Williams had reached a nadir. His career was in decline, and he had long abused alcohol, pills, and cocaine.

During their long—and for Williams liquid—lunch, Williams gave Grissom a mission. He recited the names of actresses who had appeared in his plays while Grissom scribbled them on a menu. Williams offered to buy Grissom a plane ticket to New York where he was to find the women (and a few men) and ask if Williams had mattered to them.

Grissom made two more trips to New Orleans to meet with Williams in September and then stayed in touch with him by phone for several months.

“Tennessee and I were made for each other at that particular time,” said Grissom in a recent telephone interview. “He had to be really desperate to look at this twenty-year-old kid and give him this assignment.”

In February 1983, Grissom learned that Williams had died in a New York City hotel room, likely from a combination of Seconal (a barbiturate) and cocaine.

Although Grissom had accepted the task Williams assigned him—to go to New York and talk to the people who had inspired Williams and whom he had loved—he put it off for years. He had long wanted to escape Baton Rouge, but he attended classes at LSU through 1984, leaving without a degree. He took advertising jobs and wrote profiles and reviews for Gris Gris, the Baton Rouge Enterprise, the Morning Advocate, and Rouge magazine.

He did take one step toward honoring Williams’s request. He sent actress Marian Seldes the notes Williams had dictated about her.

He had actually met Seldes years earlier when he attended a Broadway performance of Deathtrap with his high school drama club in 1978. Grissom went backstage to talk to Seldes. “She said, ‘I think we should be friends,’” he said. “When Tennessee started naming names, I told him I already knew her. He called her and she said, ‘Yes, I spent some time with this boy.’”

Finally, Grissom’s father insisted he accept the task Williams had given him. “He felt very strongly that you do not let people down,” said Grissom, whose father died in 2009. “It always really bothered him that I had not honored this request. He said, ‘Here is the money. Go and try to do it.’”

Grissom arrived in New York on St. Patrick’s Day 1989. “I thought the parade was for me,” he joked. “You’re finally here!” Within months he was living in the rent-stabilized eight-room apartment he still occupies, with a roommate he describes as one of his best friends. The book is partially dedicated to her.

As Grissom slowly began to work on the project, one of the first people he contacted was Seldes. “Marian was my greatest proponent,” he said. “She told me, ‘This is a book,’ but I rejected the idea. I thought, ‘There’s no book here. I have all these beautiful swatches of fabric, but no way to stitch them together. I have to write it the way he flung it at me.’”

Between interviews—most in person, some by phone—he took a series of jobs, working in gift shops at some of New York’s best museums, writing for Martha Stewart’s TV show, editing copy for Penthouse magazine, promoting Miramax films during Oscar season. A job as a front-desk clerk at the Carlyle Hotel led to High Season, a TV series that was optioned by HBO. “I wrote the pilot, but it died in development.” He also wrote episodes for Sex and the City, Will & Grace, and other series.

He worked as a consultant for several restaurants and planned to publish The Intrepid Foodie. “That was a book [actress] Carrie Nye and I were gonna write,” he said. “I got an advance and then decided I didn’t want to do it.” 

Grissom met Nye, a native of Mississippi, through his work on the Williams project, and they hit it off. Together they wrote cookbooks, including Cooking for One While Drunk. “Then we wanted to introduce Jews to Cajun cuisine so we wrote Jew with a Roux,” said Grissom. The cookbooks have been given to friends in manuscript form, but neither has been published. “It was a joke,” he said.

Between earning a living and leading a life, Grissom carried out his mission, writing and calling people on Williams’ list and seeking them out at public events. When they opened the door and heard him say he had been sent by “Tenn” to see if he had mattered to them, “The looks on their faces were priceless.”

Somehow he persuaded the famous and the fading to talk to him. “I think I just outlasted them,” he said. “I got into a partnership with them. They wanted to do it for love of Tennessee. If I had walked in and been a dolt and not done my homework, they wouldn’t have talked to me. I just got along with them. I was in my late twenties, but I knew the era they were talking about. They must have thought, ‘Oh, good, he’ll be our witness.’”

Grissom attributes that to lots of time at the library. “Before I met with someone I had to read everything she did,” he said. “People would say, ‘Your research is an excuse to not finish the book.’ I started this book on a typewriter! But it was very personal. I felt like I was crocheting a rug and didn’t want to drop a stitch. You want it to be perfect.”

He interviewed more than one hundred people—mostly women, mostly actors—who had mattered to Williams. They included Maureen Stapleton, Lillian Gish, Jessica Tandy, Kim Stanley, and Katharine Hepburn. Perhaps most important to Grissom was Seldes, who became a cherished friend. (She died in 2014.)

They talked about their lives and their work, their politics and their religion, their relationships—and of course about the man they called Tenn. They talked about Williams’ most compelling female characters, including Blanche and Stella from A Streetcar Named Desire, Amanda and Laura from The Glass Menagerie, and Maggie from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

In 2007, while working on the book, Grissom underwent treatment for cancer. “All of my crises are choreographed by Bob Fosse,” he joked. “But even though I was going through something terrible, I think of it as a great time in my life because at night I worked on my book.”

Part of the reason he looks back on it as a great time is that Grissom had found the woman he considered the perfect editor for his book, Victoria Wilson of Knopf. She is a writer herself, having written a 2013 biography of Barbara Stanwyck.   

“When I turned in my manuscript, it was 898 pages,” said Grissom. “Vicky called me and said, ‘This book borders on greatness, but we’re gonna have to cut it. I don’t publish Russian novels.’”

Grissom narrowed his focus to Williams’ relationships with the women in his life and cut back on biographical detail. 

His book, Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog, came out last month to rhapsodic reviews, launched at the Corner Bookstore in New York. From there, Grissom went to the Woodstock Writers Festival; Oxford, Mississippi; and New Orleans. By the end of the month, he was in his hometown of Baton Rouge for a book signing (on Williams’ birthday), a talk to students at his alma mater, and an ice-cream social with family and friends.

He has another book in mind, based on two years of conversations with Marlon Brando—who owned the role of Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar both on stage and on screen. Although he never met Grissom personally, they spoke often on the phone during a trying time in Brando’s life. “He was great,” said Grissom. “And he needed someone to talk to.” His tentative title is The Lake of the Mind, based on a line from a Kenneth Rexroth poem often quoted by Brando: “As the full moon rises/The swan sings/In sleep/On the lake of the mind.”

When the book tour ends, Grissom will return to New York, where he works as a reservationist at Acme Restaurant, whose Danish chef Mads Refslund is the current hot item. “I’ve been there almost a year,” said Grissom. “They have been incredibly supportive of my book and the tour.”

As a Southerner, he said, his life has always revolved around food, which may have helped him gain access to all those celebrities. “I can throw together a pound cake in no time. I know how to show up with an anecdote and a covered dish, and I don’t leave.”

Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.