Very few people know this, but…Theodor Geisel, a.k.a. Doctor Seuss, and Tennessee Williams a.k.a. Tennessee Williams once decided to try a literary collaboration. It was in 1927, while working in the dining room of the Algonquin Hotel in New York City that these future pharaohs of fiction first laid eyes on each other. They were immediately bound by two things: Love of the written word and Ornithophobia, the fear of birds.
When Young Theodor was a toddler, his parents rented a cottage on Cape Cod. One day, a seagull seeking nourishment for its chicks, lifted baby Theodor off of his beach blanket and flew away. Fortunately for him, he was too chewy, so they sent him back. Throughout life, the only way Theodor could shield this horrifying experience from his psyche was to constantly rhyme. It gave reason to why he would later write a children’s story about an elephant named Horton who sat on a fragile bird’s egg.
At the age of twenty-four, Theodor told his parents: “Mother, Father, please don’t bother setting my place at dinner tonight. Thank you, thank you for all you have done, and count me gone for the rest of my life.” “Oh dear”, Mrs. Geisel replied, “Is it because of the seagull I have baking in the oven?”And with that, Theodor Geisel invented the eye-roll and left his hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts, to see if he had what it took to survive in the big city.
Theodor’s plan was to work the Algonquin Hotel dining room as a busboy and try to soak up as much education as he could from the sophisticated and, at times, pretentious cadre of literati at the world famous Algonqiun Trapezoid Table.
Dorothy Parker was once quoted as saying “Nobody can bus a Zoid faster than Teddy G.” However, the table’s sharply-pointed corners made life miserable for the young man, inflicting his midsection and groin with countless bruises and punctures. He tried to soldier on, but the trapezoid was having its way.
Late one night, after everyone had gone home, Teddy covertly climbed into the Algonquin through an open basement window and made his way up to the dining room. He then carefully pulled a top-of-the-line Henry Disston saw from his trousers and artfully shaped the trapezoid into a round table.
The next day, when the Algonquin regulars gathered, they grew confused. Some were even nonplussed, which really means the same thing. The reshaping of the geometry eliminated two places at the table. Alexander Wolcott suggested that they insert a leaf to make more room. But that idea was brushed aside as not being witty enough. Robert Benchley suggested that they solve the problem with a game of musical chairs. As predicted, the two members with the scrawniest derrieres were bumped. This explains why for several decades, sportswriter Heywood Braun and actor/comedian Harpo Marx would neither speak to, make eye contact with, nor honk at Teddy Geisel.
And so, the Algonquin Roundtable came into being.
Enter Thomas Lanier Williams the Third, all of sixteen years of age when he ran away from home in 1927 and headed for New York City. Why the nickname? Thomas’s father, Cornelius, was star alcoholic placekicker for the University of Tennessee. He told his young charge, “Son, be grateful that I didn’t go to Ole Miss.” Which was prophetic, because decades later, “Ole Miss” is exactly what Noel Coward would nickname Tennessee Williams.
Young Tennessee’s life was also complicated by his mother’s alcohol-fueled insistence that babies are delivered by stork. It terrified the boy. That, and the horrifying thought that Jews cannot eat milk with meat contributed to Tennessee’s alcoholism. But not to his homosexuality. However, years later, sleeping with Frank Merlo, his personal secretary, did.
It wasn’t until his 40s that Tennessee, with help from a team of psychiatrists, conquered his bird phobia. This allowed him to change the titles of two of his classic plays. Sweet Iguana Of Youth became Sweet Bird Of Youth, which freed up a key component for use in the title Night Of The Iguana.
And so, in the spring of 1927, when Tennessee Williams joined the kitchen staff of the Algonquin Hotel as a dishwasher, he and busboy Teddy Geisel became fast friends. They spoke for hours on end about their dreams of becoming published writers. Well, Tennessee spoke, Teddy rhymed. And bonded by a fear of birds, their meals, by preference, were always chickenless, duckless and eggless.
Late one night, after attending the wrestling matches at Madison Square Garden, T and T decided to strip down to their skivvies in the Algonquin pantry, and attempt to reproduce some of the grappling holds they had just witnessed. Dorothy Parker, who was pacing the hotel trying in advance to come up with her next ten “off-the-cuff” Roundtable quips, spied the boys putting their sinewy, scantily-clad physiques through several sexy wrestling positions.
Miss Parker, who was quite famous for a healthy sexual appetite, just the previous Friday, “got to know” the entire Brooklyn Dodger bullpen. So naturally, when she surprised the boys, who were in full half-nelson, Miss P lobbied for a ménage a trois. Teddy, however, was uncomfortable with the gender math, preferring one male, two females. Young Tennessee thought a ménage a trois was some kind of French dessert. Dorothy replied that “it’s a dessert for which you will definitely come back for seconds.”
In the end, the horny sexual novices acquiesced to the two-on-one. But once the coitus commenced, it was evident that in the excitement, young Tennessee could not hold it. He finished before he even got to the third eyelet of his button-fly trousers. The wait for Dorothy P.’s expected gibe was a short one. “Kid, your sexual “peckerdillo” has given new meaning to the phrase “dead on arrival.”
And what of Teddy G? Well, he was so nervous that he began rhyming. “First I will your nipple tweak, then your G-spot I shall seek.” Dorothy later confided to a friend that she was so turned on by Teddy’s couplet that she continued to orgasm without provocation until lunch the following day.
After the Parker experience, and the constantly prying eyes of the seedy dormitory inhabitants of the downtown YMCA at which they were housed, the boys yearned for some much-needed privacy. They decided to look for a room together, where they could work undisturbed on their literary endeavors.
An ad was answered in the New York Herald Tribune for a rental at number nineteen Jane Street in Greenwich Village. It turned out that it was Eugene O’Neill’s apartment. They were so exhilarated to be living in the same quarters as such a world-renowned playwright, that they didn’t mind that the “room” was a linen closet.
One evening, they watched through the closet’s keyhole as O’Neill was having sexual relations with a woman on his kitchen table. It turned out to be none-other than Miss Dorothy Parker.
And when in the heat of the action, Miss P. screamed out to a confused O’Neill, “Rhyme to me! Rhyme to me!”, the boys did all they could to muffle their giggles. Unfortunately, O’Neill overheard, and the tittering twosome were evicted.
When T and T learned that a room down the hall was available, they hustled over and knocked on the door. It was opened by another none-other, T.S. Eliot, who was stark naked and in the process of intimacy with, yup, Dorothy Parker. When she saw the two lads, she immediately suggested a ménage a quatre which was met with Eliot’s approval. The boys turned tail and got the hell out of there.
Fortunately, Teddy and Tennessee were in the good graces of Algonquin pastry chef Horton, who allowed them to stay in the storage room next to the dessert pantry. Unfortunately, Horton heard a hooting in the stock room after Teddy recited a derogatory rhyme about his beloved Grand Marnier Souffle. Not only were the boys evicted from their residence, but also from their jobs at the Algonquin.
Without income, T and T could not pay for a room. It was then that the boys learned the meaning of suffering for your art. The only place in the city where they could bed down for the night was under the Brooklyn Bridge, where the living conditions were less than optimum. With premature failure staring them down, they decided that there might be safety in literary numbers and agreed to collaborate. With Theodor’s bouncy rhymes and Tennessee’s dark remembrances of dysfunctional Southern family life, they produced Cat In The Hat Tin Roof. Well, at least page one.
It opens, as an inebriated Maggie the Cat, a “pretty young woman with anxious lines in her face and a huge aubergine bonnet” enters the bedroom shouting:
“Give my nipple a little tweak, then for the love of God, find my g-spot you impotent creep!”
As she gets undressed, her alcoholic husband Brick replies, “No! No! Make that Cat go away! Tell that Cat in the Hat I do not want to play. She makes me feel beneath a worm, ‘cause a football injury put a hurtin’ on my sperm.”
“And then Brick prematurely ejaculates. Which causes Maggie to roll her eyes.”
Tennessee, who always loved his buddy’s rhymes shouted, “It’s gold! Gold I tell you!” According to several witnesses, it was the first time that phrase had ever been uttered.
Then Tennessee and Theodor in unison shouted, “Write what you know!” And followed with a fist bump. Also a first.
The boys were so excited, they didn’t notice an ironic pigeon swoop down, snatch the page from Teddy’s hand and fly off into the canyons between the concrete colossuses of the city. T and T were terrified, mortified and a half-dozen other “fieds”, none of them good.
Although some might say at that moment their literary careers literally took flight, to Theodor Seuss Geisel and Tennessee Williams, it was a dark omen that their partnership should immediately end. They went their separate ways, never to speak to one another again. The fear of birds that bonded them, had also torn them apart.
For years, historical purists and biographers would shout, “Old Wives Tale!!” But romanticists swear that in the pre-Depression 1920s, somewhere in the City of New York, a pigeon’s maternity nest was lined with the aborted collaboration of two of the greatest writers America has ever produced.
