Tennessee Williams was born on this day in 1911. Read about his relationship with Lady Maria St. Just, the self-appointed keeper of the playwright’s flame.
Lady Maria St. Just during the 1990 Broadway production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”Lady Maria St. Just, who, it was said, was neither a lady nor a saint nor just, died, in England, on February 15, 1994. She was famous for her high spirits and her high-hat ways, which won her many friends and many enemies. She was a resourceful hostess and a good cook, but humble pie was not on her menu.
Maria’s frenetic energy—her ability to act out her anxiety as momentum—was something that Williams teased in “This Is ,” in which the Countess refers to “my spectacular velocity through time.” Maria was driven, and she found a way, by sheer force of personality, to scale both the English aristocracy and the aristocracy of success. Maria spoke loudly and carried a big shtick. “She scared people,” Gore Vidal says.
Maria gave credibility to her story, and to her aura of artistic entitlement, by associating with the rich and famous, who acted as a kind of hedge against loss. “She always had to have some adored figure whom she was fiercely loyal to, even when the great figure did notloyalty, much less fierce loyalty,” Vidal says. In 1945, she attached herself to Sir John Gielgud, who served as her protector and her entrée into the theatre. “I was the dogsbody,” Maria told.
Gore Vidal, who hung out with Williams in Paris after the playwright bolted from the prospect of a disastrous London opening, starring Helen Hayes as Amanda Wingfield, believes that the two must have met several weeks later, at a party given by Binkie Beaumont. But, wherever the meeting took place, it made boon companions of Maria, Vidal, and Williams. Vidal recalls the three of them walking along the Strand the following day: “Maria ate and ate. She and her mother were poor.
Maria played the devoted, adorable girl; Williams was the benevolent sugar daddy, always ready to spring for vacation tickets, hotels, loans, jewelry, even an occasional dress or fur. “I felt I was in a state of grace when I was with him,” Maria later said, and she was: protected by the big magic of Williams’ talent and renown from a world whose security, in her case, had a habit of collapsing.
We left Maria in Paris, impecunious and gay and charming as ever . . . not too depressed over the fact that our friend Jay has apparently resumed his American affair. She makes me think of a joke about a Brooklyn “queen” whose lover had gone to sea. A friend said how are you feeling, and the response was: “I am inconsolable! I’ve only had five sailors since supper!”
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