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leading men

Tennessee Williams & Frank Merlo’s secret romance is about to get the Hollywood treatment

By Cameron Scheetz September 12, 2024 at 4:00pm

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Tennessee Williams (left), Frank Merlo (right) | Photo Credits: Getty Images

Director Luca Guadagnino has got the great gay writers of yore—and their lovers—on his brain.

After the North American premiere of Queer—based on the trippy auto-fiction novel from William S. Burroughs—at the Toronto International Film Festival, producer Peter Spears (who also worked on Call Me By Your Name) revealed that he and the filmmaker’s next collaboration would be a feature about Tennessee Williams.

Williams, of course, is the gay playwright who penned some of the most acclaimed American plays of all time, many of which included queer themes and characters. In other words, it’s high time this legend got the big-screen treatment, and Guadagnino seems like just the guy to do it.

But this won’t be any old biopic. The in-development project is based off the 2020 Christopher Castellani novel Leading Men, an “alternative-history fiction,” which imagines what happened during one week in the summer of 1953, a week in which the real-life Williams’ diary mysteriously included no new entries.

Image Credit: ‘Leading Men,’ Penguin Publishing Group

As the book’s logline reads, its story first takes us to a party thrown by Truman Capote in Portofino, Italy, where Williams and his longtime lover Frank Merlo meet an aspiring Swedish actress, an encounter that “will go on to alter all of their lives.”

Color us intrigued! Last we heard, The Inheritance playwright Matthew López (who also directed Red, White & Royal Blue) was tapped to write the screenplay for Leading Men, so a team-up between him and Guadagnino certainly sounds very exciting—and very gay.

But, more importantly, this news reminded us that the passionate, years-long romance between Tennessee Williams and Frank Merlo was truly one for the ages, and one very much worth remembering…

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The secret love story of Tennessee Williams & Frank Merlo

By the time the couple met in 1948, Williams had already cemented his status as one of the greatest living playwrights, having debuted the timeless A Streetcar Named Desire the year prior to great acclaim.

Merlo, for his part, was a working-class Sicilian-American actor who had grown up in New Jersey. Despite his screen-ready handsomeness, he hadn’t really managed to break through in the business. He appeared in a handful of Western films throughout the ’40s, but often in bit parts that frequently went uncredited.

Still, he certainly looked like a movie star, and when Williams first laid eyes on him at the Atlantic House bar in Provincetown, he couldn’t see anything else.

“My continual and intense scrutiny must have burned through his shoulders, for after a while he turned toward me and grinned,” Williams wrote of Merlo that night in his Memoirs. It was love at first sight.

Photo Credit: Frank Merlo & Tennessee Williams, Getty Images

And thus began a 15-year love affair that would inspire much of Williams most creative—and romantic—work. Merlo gave up acting, more or less, to become the writer’s secretary full-time, living with him in his Manhattan apartment, his Key West home, and frequently traveling abroad together.

The guise of Merlo’s “job” was largely to protect the fact that the two men were romantically together. Many closest to the two understood this truth—in fact, you could call it an “open secret”—but such was the nature of being gay at the time, and their relationship was never acknowledged publicly in the press.

In 1951, Williams wrote The Rose Tattoo, which he called his “love play” and was clearly inspired by his feelings for Merlo. Though he seldom wrote directly about his own life, it’s been said the character Alvaro—a Sicilian truck driver—was loosely based on his lover, drawing from Merlo’s “playfulness, sense of humor, deep feelings, and athletic physique.”

Despite the secrecy, Williams has described his early years living with Merlo as the happiest and most productive of his life. However, over time, both men’s heavy reliance on drugs and alcohol is said to have put an intense strain on their relationship, and they had their fair share of rocky periods.

In 1962, Merlo was diagnosed with lung cancer, at which point Williams relocated him back to his Manhattan apartment and stayed by his side as his health waned. Before Merlo passed in 1963, it’s said his last words to Williams were, “I’m used to you now,” which the writer understood to be an admission of deep love.

Many claim 1961’s The Night Of The Iguana to be Williams’ last truly great work, which is attributed (by even Williams himself) to the fact that he fell into an extended, dark depression after Merlo’s death, turning further into debilitating drug use.

He would continue to write, and eventually found another romantic partner in aspiring writer Robert Carroll, many years his junior, but Williams was never the same. He was discovered dead in a New York City hotel in February 1983, found to have toxic levels of drugs in his body. He was 71.

It was only earlier this year that the Tennessee Williams Annual Review published a never-before-seen poem from Williams called “The Final Day Of Your Life,” which, as the title might imply, provides an intimate portrait of his last moments with Merlo, writing specifically about sitting next to his alining companion while he was attached to an oxygen tank.

Speaking with The Historic New Orleans Collection, Williams scholar and editor Thomas Keith had this to say about the poem’s significance:

“It was unusual for Williams to be that straightforward about their relationship, particularly in his poetry, until much later… Williams is remembered now as having been candid about his personal feelings, someone whose life was mostly an open book, but during his lifetime, that candor—both in his writing and in media interviews—turned out to be trailblazing: it paved the way for the social acceptance yet to come, but at the time it entailed risks and consequences. This poem is a reminder of the pain he felt at the loss of his companion and at his inability to reveal or fully describe the extent of that loss in public.”

Though Williams and Merlo’s story has a tragic end, we’re still discovering new details about the love these two men had for each other, and the impact that love had on the writer’s body of work—one of the most consequential and influential oeuvres in American culture.

If and when this adaptation of Leading Men comes to the big screen—whether or not that’s with Luca Guadagnino as its director—we hope it shines a spotlight on one of the great gay love stories of this century. One still waiting to be told in full.

Christopher Castellani’s book Leading Men is available for purchase right now through Amazon Prime—stay tuned for more updates on the film adaptation! The latest edition of the Tennessee Williams Annual Review is available for order via the Historic New Orleans Collection’s website.

Image Credit: ‘Tennessee Williams Annual Review 2024,’ published by The Historic New Orleans Collection

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4 Comments*

  • RIGay

    Wow… how tragically beautiful. I will look forward to the movie.

  • Walking the Dog

    The book is wonderful. I’ve been looking forward to this movie for a few years ever since I first read about it. Guadagnino and Lopez working together is very exciting. Let’s hope it happens soon!

  • jp47

    I remember reading in some book or article about Williams that he and his friends referred to Merlo as “the little horse.” Make of that what you will.

  • OzJay

    The headline is entirely misleading if the movie is to be based on Leading Men. The novel purports to be inspired by Williams and Merlo (and Capote), but it’s a work of imagination, and only vaguely related to the facts of Williams and Merlo’s relationship. Ergo: the film is about fictional characters, not about Tennessee and Frank. Personally, I found the novel underwhelming and annoying. It just left me wanting to go back to the Williams biographies to figure out what was fact and what was fiction. And, ultimately, the fiction did nothing to illuminate the life of Williams and Merlo, so what was the point?

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