Costly performances

by Bruce Smith

Sympathetic, admiring, gifted with seemingly total recall and afflicted with grammatical lapses, a Chicago publicist describes his close three-year friendship with the aging, alcoholic, drug-addicted Tennessee Williams. In Key West, Chicago and New York, assisting the playwright as he worked on the production of his last two plays, Clothes for a Summer Hotel and A House Not Meant to Stand, Smith kept a journal in which he recorded episodes of the dramatist's paranoia, his feelings about Marlon Brando, Truman Capote, Paul Newman, Geraldine Page...