So if the giant DEPRESSION and DEATH up above didn't give it away, this section isn't going to be an upper.
In 1957, Williams's play Orpheus Descending opened on Broadway. It was a critical and commercial flop, closing after only sixty-eight performances. Williams became deeply depressed and underwent psychoanalysis.
We hope he didn't consult his parents. We all remember how they handled mental illness.
Well...all of us, except Rose.
Two more of Williams's plays soon flopped, but in 1961, The Night of the Iguana premiered and won Williams his third and final Tony Award. The play was his last critical success for a decade.
Depression wasn't the only culprit in Williams's creative collapse. In the mid-1950s, he started using drugs and alcohol to deal with his constant anxiety.
We use ice cream and Netflix to deal with our anxiety, so...yeah, we're pretty hardcore, too.
By the early 1960s, his daily intake of substances had grown to staggering proportions. In any given day, Tennessee could knock back a fifth of liquor, two packs of cigarettes, and handfuls of pills.12
But could he binge Netflix for so long that the company sends a representative to check and see if he was okay?
Yeah. Didn't think so. Point, Shmoop.
Williams was also receiving care from Max Jacobsen, a.k.a. "Dr. Feel Good." The New York City doctor was known for providing his well-to-do patients with prescriptions for vast quantities of mood-altering drugs. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his license was revoked after patients died.
Should've prescribed Netflix, Max.
Williams spoke openly about his dependency on barbiturates, saying that they unblocked his creativity. However, many biographers believe they blunted his creative spark.
Perhaps the biggest blow came in 1963, when his partner, Frank Merlo, died of lung cancer. Grief-stricken, Williams fell into a depression that lasted for ten years. In 1969, he had a nervous breakdown and his brother Dakin had him committed to a mental hospital in St. Louis, where Williams stayed for three months.
When asked about his decision, Dakin said, "there were certain measures that had to be...dakin."
...Fine, we'll stop making puns about Dakin.
In 1972, the play Small Craft Warnings opened off-Broadway and ran for a respectable two hundred performances. It was the last of Williams's professional successes. He wrote a string of critical stinkers, some of which closed after fewer than a dozen performances. Though he was hurt by the reviews at times, Williams refused to give up his craft. "I'm very conscious of my decline in popularity, but I don't permit it to stop me because I have the example of so many playwrights before me. I know the dreadful notices Ibsen got," he told an interviewer. "So I keep writing. I am sometimes pleased with what I do - for me, that's enough."13
And so it was, until February 24th 1983, when Williams choked to death on a medicine bottle cap in his room at the Hotel Elysée in New York City. The 71-year-old was buried in Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri.
Upon his death, Marlon Brando said, "I always felt like Tennessee and I were compatriots. He told the truth as best he perceived it, and never turned away from things that beset or frightened him. We are all diminished by his death."14
Yet as was so often the case, nobody could sum up Tennessee Williams's life better than Williams himself. He wrote in his 1975 Memoirs, "I've had a wonderful and terrible life and I wouldn't cry for myself, would you?"15