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,