Tennessee in New Orleans

Where one of the greatest playwrights of the 20th century found a spiritual home

by

Thomas Lanier Williams III was born in Columbus, Mississippi in spring of 1911. But it was in the late 1930s, after his first stint in New Orleans’ French Quarter, that he became the enduringly-beloved playwright “Tennessee” Williams. Upon his first arrival, Williams mused in his journal, “Here surely is the place that I was made for, if any place on this funny old world.” 

New Orleans’ uninhibited bohemian-ness offered a stark contrast to Williams’ strict Episcopalian upbringing in Columbus and later St. Louis, Missouri and allowed him the liberation to more deeply explore his own personality and imagination. “I think he felt free here. Discovered freedom here, discovered himself,” said Dylan Jordan, Interpretation Assistant at the Historic New Orleans Collection (HNOC), who also curated a French Quarter walking tour as part of the exhibition Backstage at a Streetcar Named Desire. “People say that he came to New Orleans as Tom and then transformed himself into Tennessee; that he kind of discovered his sexuality and passion for life here.”

“Here surely is the place that I was made for, if any place on this funny old world.” —Tennessee Williams, of New Orleans

Williams’ life and work were characterized by his restlessness and frequent desire for new location; changes in scene. Though his itinerant tendencies continued until his 1983 death in a New York City hotel room, his journals and letters reveal a particular fondness for the Crescent City; he writes of it with a quality of home. 

“I think New Orleans was an agent that helped him be okay with who he was,” posited Mark Cave, Senior Historian at the HNOC and curator of Backstage at A Streetcar Named Desire. “Plus interacting with people, all sorts of people. I think that that was inspiring to him. I lived in the Quarter before, and it’s like being in this sort of social pinball machine. You just kind of bounce from conversation to conversation and person to person. And I think that was very, very good fuel for his writing.” Cave also pointed out that while living in New Orleans, Williams would hang out in bars ranging from the upscale Hotel Monteleone to the more bohemian and gay-friendly Bourbon House Bar; all of which no doubt provided inspiration for his plays and personal life. “I think it helped him come to comfort with who he was, and also provided constant inspiration.”

Williams first arrived in New Orleans in late December 1938 at the age of twenty-seven. After attending three universities, he had finally graduated earlier that year with a B.A. from the University of Iowa, with middling grades (some B’s and C’s, with an F in technical theatre), and found himself in the French Quarter in time to celebrate the New Year. He documented his immediate impression of the city in a letter to his mother the day after he first arrived, on the evening of December 29, with the opening line: “This is most fascinating place I’ve ever been.”

[Read the history of another Louisiana literary icon, Ernest Gaines, here.]

A few days later, on January 2, 1939, he elaborated on this thought—highlighting, from the perspective of the twenty-first century reader, both similarities and changes that have occurred in New Orleans in the more than eighty years since he penned his impressions: 

I’m crazy about the city. I walk continually, there is so much to see … The Quarter is really quainter than anything I’ve seen abroad—in many homes, the original atmosphere is completely preserved. Today being a holiday, I visited Audubon Park, which is lovelier than I could describe, blooming like summer with Palm Trees and live-oaks garlanded with Spanish Moss, beautifully laid out. Also visited the batture-dwellers (squatters) along the river, and, for contrast, the fine residential district and the two universities, Loyola and Tulane. The latter appears to be a splendid school—it was closed today so I’m going to make another visit. The Quarter is alive with antique and curio shops where some really artistic stuff is on sale, relics of Creole homes that have gone to the block. I was invited to dinner Sunday by some people who own a large antique store. Their home is a regular treasure chest of precious objects.

Food is amazingly cheap. I get breakfast at the French market for a dime. Lunch and dinner amount to about fifty cents at a good cafeteria near Canal Street. And the cooking is the best I’ve encountered away from home. Raw oysters, twenty cents a dozen! Shrimp, crab, lobster, and all kinds of fish—I have a passion for sea-food which makes their abundance a great joy.

The courtyards are full of palms, vines and flowering poinsetta, many with fountains and wells, and all with grill-work, balconies, and little winding stairs. It is heaven for painters and you see them working everywhere. Mr. and Mrs. Heldner (Alice Lipp-mann’s friends) say that if I get desperate I can earn bread as a model—but I trust something better will turn up. 

Like many young, struggling artists at that time and today, part of New Orleans’ appeal for Williams was its affordable cost of living. He mused on the Quarter’s fluidity of class in a letter to his grandmother shortly after his arrival: I hope you will like the Vieux Carré. It is a very heterogenous neighborhood. Some very wealthy people live next door to some who are destitute—it is all mixed up. The atmosphere is pretty Bohemian but it is perfectly safe to walk around by yourself, even at night. If you like quaint old places you ought to enjoy it.

He told his mother in the January 2, 1939 letter that his present money is “holding out pretty good,” and that he will write before he depletes it and provide a more permanent mailing address. 

“I think he felt free here. Discovered freedom here, discovered himself,” —Dylan Jordan, Interpretation Assistant at the Historic New Orleans Collection

Williams ended up staying in the Crescent City for a stint of seven weeks that first visit, living in an attic apartment at 722 Toulouse Street, which he once referred to as “a poetic evocation of all the cheap rooming houses of the world,” and would provide extensive fodder for his New Orleans-set plays, especially his 1970s play Vieux Carré. “He only lived there for a matter of weeks, but it was during that period that he first kind of fell in love with the city, and met people and had experiences that would inform his writing for the rest of his life,” said Jordan, whose walking tour on Williams’ life in the Quarter begins at 722 Toulouse, which belongs to the HNOC today. 

Williams’ landlady during his tenure on Toulouse, Mrs. Anderson, would be a particular source of inspiration—providing the basis for the harsh landlady character Mrs. White in Vieux Carré. Together, she and Williams opened a restaurant downstairs called Quarter Eat Shop, which they ran for around a week, and for which Williams coined the phrase “Meals for a Quarter in the Quarter”. Williams made up flyers featuring the phrase and wrote that he would pass them out in the street before rushing back inside to wait tables. I serve as waiter, cashier, publicity manager, host—in fact, every possible capacity, including, sometimes, dishwasher. When not busy in the dining-room I stand on the sidewalk and try to drag people upstairs! It really is a great deal of fun. 

Once, Anderson was said to have poured boiling water through the floorboards of an upper apartment when she was displeased with the volume of another tenant’s party downstairs. (The land-lady has had a hard time adjusting herself to the Bohemian spirit of the Vieux-Carré, Williams explained to his mother.) Williams was called into court as a witness of the event and wrote of being in the tight predicament of determining how to be honest without offending his landlady. Mrs. Anderson said she did not pour the water, but I, being under oath, could not perjure myself—the best I could do was say I thought that it was highly improbable that any lady would do such a thing! 

After an eventful first few weeks in New Orleans, and a failed attempt to secure work with the WPA Writers’ Project there, he accepted a ride west for California with saxophonist Jim Parrott, whom he had befriended. Williams wrote his mother from the road, We delayed our departure till Monday to see a little of the Mardi Gras—two days of it was quite enough.

While in California in 1939, Williams won awards from the Group Theatre for two one-act plays he submitted for a competition under the name Tennessee Williams—his first time using the pseudonym. In some of his more intimate and friendly letters sent thereafter, he signed simply, “10”.

The following year in 1940, Williams’ play Battle of Angels was produced in Boston; critics and audiences deemed it a major flop. “He moved back after the Battle of Angels premiere, which was really bad,” Jordan said, “So he came here to relax and try to rejuvenate, but he was very poor.” Upon Williams’ return to the city in 1941, he wrote to his friend Paul Bigelow, My second New Orleans period is under way—the Quarter has cleaned up and become smart, respectable, and expensive so I have located in another part of town. During this “second New Orleans period” Williams first rented an apartment near Lee’s Circle, purchased himself a bike for ten dollars, and delighted in the constant stream of sailors he was able to clandestinely invite in and seduce via a discreet back door. (A misunderstanding about some sailors who come in occasionally to discuss literature with me provoked a tedious little quarrel with the landlady… Williams would write to Bigelow.)

He later purchased a membership to the New Orleans Athletic Club, which is mentioned by Mitch in A Streetcar Named Desire, and wrote of it to Bigelow: I got reckless and invested half my cheque in this rather exclusive Club, but it is worth it as there is a marvelous salt water pool, Turkish baths, Etc., and the prettiest Creole belles in town. I am already well-established in their circles and my particular intimate is a Bordelon, one of the oldest families in the city. Such delicate belles you have never seen, utterly different from the northern species. Everybody is ‘Cher!’—I actually pass for ‘butch’ in comparison and am regarded as an innovation—the ‘Out-door type’! And am consequently enjoying a considerable success…‘Chere,’ I have a room on Royal, right opposite the gay bar—The St. James, so I can hover like a bright angel over the troubled waters of homosociety.

In 1943, the same year his sister Rose was lobotomized, Williams worked as a scriptwriter for MGM, which he did not seem to find particularly rewarding, and spent that summer working on a screenplay titled The Gentleman Caller that would eventually be produced in Chicago the following year as The Glass Menagerie. In 1945 The Glass Menagerie was produced in New York. Williams responded to his first major success in the same way he reacted to the failure of Battle of Angels: by returning to his spiritual home of New Orleans. 

Arriving back in the French Quarter in 1945, Williams was clearly disillusioned by the glamour of the New York theatre scene: Broadway seems like some revolting sickness, that involves vomiting and eating and shitting all at once. Now equipped with money and notoriety, he was giddy to be back in New Orleans, as he indicated in this letter to his agent Aubrey Wood in early January of 1946:

If you can imagine how a cat would feel in a cream-puff factory you can imagine my joy at being back in the Quarter. It was always my particular milieu but I was never here before with money! Now I can afford a place where the windows are all doors twelve feet-high with shutters, and a balcony looking out on the negro convent and the back of the cathedral. I never put on a shirt, just a leather jacket, I go unshaven for days and nobody says, Look at that bum, they say, That is the fellow who wrote The Glass Menagerie!

It is during this period living at 710 Orleans Street, when Williams was in close proximity to St. Louis Cathedral and the Sisters of the Holy Family Convent (the first convent for Black women in America, founded by Henriette Delille), that he began writing Poker Night, which would become A Streetcar Named Desire. His proximity to the Cathedral works its way into the play, like in Blanche’s line upon hearing the bells chime: “Those cathedral bells—they’re the only clean thing in the Quarter.”

Williams’ character Blanche’s experience in the Quarter also allegedly reflects Williams’ own—such as when she purchases paper lanterns on Bourbon Street to cover Stanley’s exposed lightbulb, to avoid being in direct light. Williams is said to have purchased paper lanterns himself at Honey Gee’s Oriental Gift Shop in the 600 block of Bourbon Street, at the time when there was a bustling China Town neighborhood within the French Quarter. 

"If you can imagine how a cat would feel in a cream-puff factory you can imagine my joy at being back in the Quarter." —Williams

By the end of 1946, Williams moved to 632 1/2 St. Peter Street, where he would complete Streetcar. “From both of those locations [632 1/2 St. Peter and 710 Orleans], you could probably see and hear the streetcar named Desire going down Royal Street,” noted Cave. 

Another key influence upon Streetcar pulled straight from Williams’ life on St. Peter Street was his lover at the time, working-class New Orleanian Pancho Rodriguez y Gonzales. In letters from this period, Williams regularly wrote of he and Gonzales’s “quarrels”—such as in December of 1946: Pancho and I made up after another silly misunderstanding. He thinks I have other boys. Alas, I barely have energy for one! 

“Williams and Gonzales had a very volatile relationship,” Jordan said, noting that Gonzales was said to be insecure around Williams’s artistic and literary friends. “It informed the tone of the play. And in many ways, he’s sort of the prototype for Stanley.” In one particular incident, Gonzales and Williams are said to have had a fight, after which Gonzales broke all of the light bulbs—a scene that makes its way into Streetcar when Stella tells Blanche that Stanley, “smashed all the lightbulbs with the heel of my slipper…actually, I was sorta thrilled by it.” 

In March of 1947, Williams journaled about Gonzales, writing: It looks like P. and I may have reached the hour of parting—He has been increasingly tempermental [sic]. He quit his job. Is crazily capricious. I still care for him but right now I feel a hunger for peace above all else…. ‘Poker Night’ [Streetcar] finished. A relative success, not pleasant but well-done. I think it will make good theatre, though its success is far from assured.

Today, as A Streetcar Named Desire celebrates the seventy-fifth anniversary since its Broadway premiere having garnered a Pulitzer Prize, multiple Tony Awards and Tony Award-winning revivals, a film adaptation that earned a dozen Academy Awards, and a secure place in the canon of America’s most influential plays of all time—it is safe to say that it transcended far beyond the “relative success” Williams modestly anticipated. 

Williams’ work is beautiful in the same way New Orleans is beautiful: sensitive, complex, gritty, and perfectly-imperfect. The French Quarter offered Williams an old-world beauty tempered with seediness and flaws, reminiscent of his characters like Blanche and Catherine. Williams’ plays offer audiences no sterilized sets or sugar-coated love stories—instead they depict the world as he saw it truly; a place simultaneously rough and awful, with sincere and striking moments of humanity and loveliness piercing through. That dynamic world of Williams’ imagination, which continues to endure and captivate audiences and readers across the globe today, was born of his experiences in the French Quarter. The Crescent City left an indelible mark on Williams and his literature. In turn, the cultural landscape of New Orleans—even today, more than seventy-five years later—remains undeniably richer for Williams having once chosen it for his home.  

Backstage at A Streetcar Named Desire will be on display at the Historic New Orleans Collection until July 3, and walking tours will take place May 25 and June 22. The tour is also available via the HNOC’s mobile app by searching “French Quarter Tours” in the App Store. 

In addition to the information provided by Mark Cave and Dylan Jordan at the HNOC in interviews, the following books were utilized in research for this article: 

Williams, Tennessee. The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Volume I: 1920-1945. Edited by Albert J. Devlin and Tischler Nancy Marie Patterson. New Directions Pub., 2000.

Williams, Tennessee. The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Volume II: 1945-1957. Edited by Albert J. Devlin and Tischler Nancy Marie Patterson. New Directions Pub., 2007. 

Williams, Tennessee. Notebooks. Edited by Margaret Bradham Thornton. Yale University Press, 2006. 

Williams, Tennessee. Memoirs. New Directions Pub., 2006.