Popular Culture Review Vol. 21, No. 2, Summer 2010 | Page 15
Tricky Dick Nixon, Walter Cronkite, and CBS Television 11
television images in Cat nonetheless reinforce Williams’s message in his letter
to CBS about how TV can create false illusions.
Based upon his experiences recounted in his Memoirs (1975), Williams
himself had a disparaging view of television and dismissed his interviews on
camera as “demeaning exercises” (94). Commenting on his mishaps with TV
crews from Germany, Austria, Canada, and the U.S., Williams believed for the
most part they were scandalmongers seeking to capitalize on the popular image
they perpetuated of him as “the notorious playwright, addicted to dope and all
that.” When a German crew interviewed Williams on the patio of his house on
Dumaine Street in the French Quarter, he recalled:
The commentator sat beneath a spreading banana tree which
protected him from the rain while I had to sit out in the open
getting drenched and answering all of those innocuous
questions and pretending total ignorance of their reason for
having come down here, which, of course, the fact that they
want to get some footage of the notorious American
playwright, the queer one, whose decease will soon give him a
moment of prominence in the media. Do you know how
people are about things like that? Well, if you don’t, I can tell
you. They love it. It quickens their blood. It makes them feel
immortal. (94)
Similarly, when Harry Rasky and a Canadian TV crew came to New Orleans to
interview him, they made Williams walk the streets of the Quarter, where he
was “drenched . . . with sweat instead of rain” (Memoirs 95). Again, the image
of Williams that TV carried was hardly dignified or even writerly. Like George
McGovern, whom he defended in his letter of October 3, 1972, to Walter
Cronkite and CBS, Williams was frequently stereotyped in the media in the
most unflattering poses and places the camera could discover.
However, seeing their opponent George McGovern on camera, with his
“paunch” and “lassitude” emphasized, Tricky Dick and his supporters must have
gloated in their quest for immortality through another presidential election. But
as Tennessee Williams and millions of the American electorate would find out,
Nixon would play the innocent one time too many on television. As images of
Watergate haunted American households glued to their TVs in 1974, Nixon
himself fell victim to his own politics of sullying reputations.
University of Southern Mississippi
Phillip Kolin
Notes
1 By Tennessee Williams. Copyright© The University of the South. Reprinted by
Georges Burchardt, Inc. All rights reserved.
Works Cited
Devlin, Albert J. Conversations with Tennessee Williams. Jackson: UP of Mississippi,