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      THE COFFIN TRICK

      MONTHS AGO, BACK IN ENGLAND, when I was just beginning to think down into the subject of alcohol, I became certain that whatever journey I was making would begin in a hotel room on East 54th Street, ten minutes’ walk from Broadway. I don’t know why this, of all possible locations, seemed the necessary place to start, but the story of what had happened there worked its way inside me, as certain stories will.

      In the small hours of 25 February 1983, Tennessee Williams died in his suite at the Elysée, a small, pleasant hotel on the outskirts of the Theater District. He was seventy-one, unhappy, a little underweight, addicted to drugs and alcohol and paranoid sometimes to the point of delirium. According to the coroner’s report, he’d choked on the bell-shaped plastic cap of a bottle of eyedrops, which he was in the habit of placing on or under his tongue while he administered to his vision. As a child he’d been poked in the eye with a stick, and in his twenties this damage manifested itself as a greyish cataract that covered his left pupil. Eventually it was cut away, but the sight in that eye was never good and eyedrops were among the extensive medical paraphernalia he took on all his travels.

      The next day, the New York Times ran an obituary claiming him as ‘the most important American playwright after Eugene O’Neill’. It listed his three Pulitzer Prizes, for A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Night of the Iguana, adding: ‘He wrote with deep sympathy and expansive humor about outcasts in our society. Though his images were often violent, he was a poet of the human heart.’

      Later, after carrying out chemical tests, the city’s chief medical officer, Dr. Eliot M. Grosse, amended the autopsy report to add that the barbiturate secobarbital was in Williams’s system when he died. Much later, various friends and acquaintances claimed the choking story was a cover-up to stop the press from delving into Tennessee’s numerous addictions, though the official cause of death remains asphyxia.

      It wasn’t the death he’d hoped for, either way. In his memoir, his wandering, anti-lucid memoir, he wrote that he wanted to die on a letto matrimoniale, a wedding bed, surrounded by contadini, farmers, their faces puzzled and full of sweetness, holding out in their shaking hands little glasses of vino or liquore. He wanted it to happen in Sicily, where he’d been happiest, but if that wasn’t possible he was willing to settle for the big brass bed at Dumaine Street, his house in New Orleans, where the clouds always seemed just overhead.

      There should be nothing more arbitrary than the place where someone dies, on their way from one thing to the next, and yet it’s telling, too, that a man who was forever on the move should finish up in a hotel room, surrounded by pills and paper, two bottles of wine open on his nightstand. We die as we live, disordered, and while the manner of his death was accidental to the point of grotesqueness, its location exposes that cast of vagrancy that was, though it sounds a funny thing to say, one of the most certain things about him.

      He kept all sorts of roosts in New York, though he never stayed in them for long. For years he had an apartment around the corner on East 58th Street that he shared with his partner, Frank Merlo: Frank with his sad horse face and ready charm, Frank the protector, the aide-de-camp, who died of lung cancer in 1963, inaugurating the very worst period of Williams’s Stoned Age. Later, he took an apartment in the Manhattan Plaza, the residential complex designed for performing artists. He’d been lured there by the promise of a swimming pool, but the partyish atmosphere didn’t suit him and even before he’d given up the lease he generally stayed in a suite at the Elysée.

      The hotel was useful because of its proximity to the theatres, but by the time he died it had been three years since he’d had a play on the Great White Way. The last was Clothes for a Summer Hotel, an addled rehash of the difficult marriage between Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald. ‘No growth, no change, no flow of life anywhere for us to piece together,’ Walter Kerr wrote in the New York Times, adding crossly, as if the failure were wilful: ‘ Clothes for a Summer Hotel is Tennessee Williams holding his tongue.’

      It was hardly the worst thing he’d heard from a critic. Back in 1969 Life magazine had called him a White Dwarf, continuing: ‘We are still receiving his messages, but it is now obvious that they come from a cinder.’ Imagine writing a play after that, let alone going on for another fourteen years, sitting down at your typewriter every morning, despite the depredations of drugs and alcohol, of loneliness and growing ill health. ‘Gallant,’ wrote Elia Kazan, the director who knew him as well as anyone, ‘is the word to describe Tennessee at the end.’

      You get a sense of that courage, that indefatigable work ethic, in a 1981 interview with the Paris Review, the latter half of which was conducted in his rooms at the Elysée. He talks about his plays and the people he’s known, and he touches too, a little disingenuously, on the role of alcohol in his life, saying:

      O’Neill had a terrible problem with alcohol. Most writers do. American writers nearly all have problems with alcohol because there’s a great deal of tension involved in writing, you know that. And it’s all right up to a certain age, and then you begin to need a little nervous support that you get from drinking. Now my drinking has to be moderate. Just look at the liver spots I’ve got on me!

      You know that. A little nervous support. My drinking has to be moderate. He was ‘tired’, the interviewer observes carefully, because they’d spent the preceding night in a bar called Rounds, which ‘boasts a somewhat piss-elegant decor and a clientele consisting largely of male hustlers and those who employ them’. Gallant, yes: but also not an entirely reliable witness to the traffic of his own life.

      The Elysée was not the kind of place I could afford but a friend at Condé Nast had wangled me a room. There was a chandelier in the lobby and someone had painted a trompe l’oeil garden on the far wall. It looked vaguely Italian: lemon trees, black and white tiles and a box-lined path that narrowed bluely towards some wooded hills. As I checked in I asked which floor Tennessee’s old suite was on. I’d planned to pop up in the morning and see if a chambermaid would let me peek inside. But the Sunset Suite no longer existed. The boy at the front desk, who looked like he might play field hockey, added surprisingly: ‘We divided it up to get rid of bad spirits.’

      People believe strange things. Rose Williams, Tennessee’s adored sister, who had a pre-frontal lobotomy at the age of twenty-eight and still outlived all her immediate family, refused to acknowledge death when it occurred. But once, or so her brother recorded in Memoirs, she said: ‘It rained last night. The dead came down with the rain.’ He asked, in the gentle tone he almost always used with her, if she meant their voices and she replied, ‘Yes, of course, their voices.’

      I don’t believe in ghosts, but I am interested in absences, and the fact that the room had ceased to exist pleased me. I was beginning to think that drinking might be a way of disappearing from the world, or at least of slipping one’s appointed place within it, though if you’d seen Tennessee blundering through the hallway, pie-eyed and legless, you might think conversely it made one all too painfully impossible to miss. It seemed appropriate,