Actresses and Mental Illness by Fiona Gregory

Author:Fiona Gregory
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

Diana Barrymore, Tennessee Williams, and archival memory

Reading Diana Barrymore’s work through the prism of Halberstam’s ‘queer art of failure’ helps us to reconsider the terms of this actress’s ‘failure.’ Halberstam asks: “What kind of rewards can failure offer us?” (3). Failure offered Barrymore an opportunity to express what she considered her true self – an actress whose talent lay in building characters on stage. In the 1950s, the stories of women such as Marty Mann and Lillian Roth showed that the addict is reintegrated into society through reinvention. Whether it is through a desire to help others along the path to sobriety, or renewed devotion to family or spirituality, the addict demonstrates her commitment to recovery by finding something other than alcohol to believe in. For Diana Barrymore, that ‘something to believe in,’ was performance. Even as acting and the nature of the profession could be blamed for her predicament, Barrymore herself figured it as the key to her salvation. At the close of the book version of Too Much, Too Soon, the fact that Brooks Atkinson – pre-eminent critic of the mid-twentieth century stage and arbiter of all that is good in American theatre – can see potential in her, functions as a talisman for Barrymore.

Diana Barrymore chose Tennessee Williams as the vehicle for her reinvention. In the last years of her career, the actress played Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Catherine in Suddenly Last Summer, and reprised the role of Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, which she had earlier essayed opposite Robert Wilcox. She also became close to Williams himself, visiting his beloved sister Rose and travelling overseas with him. Barrymore’s particular affinity with both Williams and his writing is demonstrated by his having begun to write a play for her shortly before her death (Lahr 399).21 Barrymore told Williams’s brother Dakin that she had “fallen instantly in love” with the playwright (Williams and Mead 224). Such statements, and claims Barrymore wanted to marry Williams, have been deployed as evidence of poor judgement and emotional instability and thus further examples of failure and madness. Thus, Hollis Alpert lingers on her “obsessive love for Tennessee Williams” (389), while Dakin Williams and Shepherd Mead characterise the relationship as “strange and tragic,” and tell readers that Barrymore’s drinking had rendered her “almost a derelict” (221, 222). Despite how others may have perceived her attachment to Williams, Barrymore herself figured it as almost spiritual – “he is my saviour on earth” (Williams and Mead 224). And Barrymore’s pursuit of Williams seems more focused on securing mainstage roles in his plays, particularly in the London production of Sweet Bird of Youth, than in winning his hand in marriage.22 Williams himself told his friend Lucy Freeman that, whatever the rumours, “Diana loved me as a writer only. That’s the truth and all of it … Diana’s only great passion, perhaps her only true love, was her struggle to become a good artist” (qtd. in Lahr 401). Barrymore herself told her

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