WHEN YOU THINK OF NEW Orleans, chances are you think of jazz, gumbo and jambalaya, but this seductive old charmer, affectionately known as ‘The Big Easy’, is also a treasure house of fiction and film sites.
Hop on the St Charles trolley and scenes from Tennessee Williams’ poignant Streetcar Named Desire spring to mind; hop off in the lovely Garden District and stroll over to 1239 First Street, the 19th-century mansion where Anne Rice wrote many of her vampire novels; head for funky Tipitina’s – perhaps for a Sunday afternoon Cajun dance party; and steep yourself in the same ambience as did Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin in the 1986 film, The Big Easy. Or wander past the ornate tombs of St Louis Cemetery No 1 and conjure up images of Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper dropping acid with ladies of easy virtue in 1969’s Easy Rider.
In addition to evocative film sites, the city excels in literary connections. You can view the outside of the former homes of such literary superstars as F Scott Fitzerald, John Dos Passos, Lillian Hellman, Walt Whitman and Thornton Wilder as well as Jackson Square’s Pontalba Buildings. This is where the then-acclaimed writer Sherwood Anderson hosted his young protégés William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, as well as Dos Passos, Carl Sandburg, Gertrude Stein and Hollywood screen writer Anita Loos, whose comic novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, inspired the 1953 film of the same name starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell.
Another resident of the oldest continuously-rented apartment building in North America, was renowned short-story writer Katherine Anne Porter and an opera, play and several novels were inspired by the colourful life of the Spanish-American heiress and aristocrat Micaela Almonester, the Baroness de Pontalba, who, enamoured by the Place des Vosges in Paris, designed and financed this elegant, balconied landmark.
Faulkner may have lived in New Orleans for only six months in 1924-1925 and reputedly was generally unpleasant, even taking airgun pot-shots from his apartment window at passers-by, including local nuns. However, it was a transformative period for him; his first published work (and that of Hemingway) appeared in the local Double Dealer literary magazine and he wrote, or was inspired to write, several novels while in New Orleans.
Today, his one-time home in Pirate’s Alley is occupied by Faulkner House Books – a Mecca for Southern literature lovers – whose owners have on occasion offered temporary accommodation to the likes of Nicholas Cage, Jeremy Irons, Sharon Stone and John Malkovich.
HEADING OUT ON A LITERARY WALKING TOUR
It’s also a popular stop on the Literary Tour of New Orleans, which I took under the guidance of Philip Centanni, a protégé of the original tour leader and Tennessee Williams authority Dr Kenneth Holditch, who joined us briefly along the route.
As might be expected, many stops along the way have associations with Williams, whose addresses include 722 Toulouse Street — which Williams called ‘a poetic evocation of all the cheap rooming houses in the world’ (it is now home to the Historic New Orleans Collection) — and 632 St Peter Street, where he wrote Streetcar Named Desire, the inspiration for the 1951 film that featured Marlon Brando and Kim Hunter as Stanley and Stella Kowalski and Vivien Leigh as her tragic, troubled sister, Blanche.
Each spring, his legacy inspires the Tennessee Williams New Orleans Literary Festival. Among its special events is a Stella and Stanley shouting competition held at the foot of the Pontalba Buildings; Brando and Hunter stand-ins watch from an overhanging balcony.
The guest of honour at this year’s festival was Mary Badham, best-known as the child actress who portrayed spunky Scout in the acclaimed 1962 film that was inspired by Harper Lee’s book To Kill a Mockingbird. An ideal choice as Lee’s controversial second and prequel book, Go Set A Watchman, published last year, was told from the viewpoint of a grown-up Scout.
Other highpoints of the festival included performances of two of Williams’ plays, The Glass Menagerie, staged in the French Quarters’ atmospheric Le Petit Theatre du Vieux (on our tour), and Orpheus Descending, in a University of New Orleans theatre.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS’ FAVOURITE RESTAURANTS
Among the other venues we visited were two of Williams’ favourite restaurants – Galatoire’s, which also inspired Galatoire: Biography of a Bistro, co-written by Holditch and Marda Burton (whose colourful literary salon I had attended on a previous visit to The Big Easy), and 175-year-old Antoine’s, reputedly the oldest continuously-operated restaurant in America. The setting for a Stella and Stanley dinner in Streetcar Named Desire, it also inspired the popular 1948 novel Dinner at Antoine’s, written by local author and hostess Frances Parkinson Keyes.
Her mansion – now known as the Beauregard-Keyes House, as it was home for three years to colourful Confederate general PGT Beauregard – featured in the 1958 film King Creole, starring Elvis Presley as a street hustler battling against gangster Walter Matthau.
The Canal Street statue of Ignatius T Reilly, the eccentric protagonist of a Confederacy of Dunces
Strolling down the main Canal Street, we stopped to view a statue to Ignatius T Reilly, the outrageous protagonist of John Kennedy Toole’s hilarious novel A Confederacy of Dunces. A sad story that; unable to find a publisher for his book, young Toole committed suicide in 1969, never to know that his book, published posthumously, was to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1981.
Although it’s not usually on Philip’s tours, his decision to include the grand old Roosevelt Waldorf-Astoria hotel on Baronne Street was a bonus. Not only was it reputedly the inspiration for the St Gregory hotel in Arthur Haley’s blockbuster novel, Hotel (resulting in the namesake TV series, set in San Francisco), but it also was the regular home-from-home of colourful, later assassinated Louisiana Governor Huey Long.
The inspiration for the Willie Stark character in Robert Penn Warren’s powerful, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All the King’s Men, he was portrayed by, first, Broderick Crawford in the 1949 Oscar-winning film of the same name and, in a later version, by Sean Penn. Then known simply as The Roosevelt, the hotel was also famous for its Blue Room nightclub which included among its performers Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Sophie Tucker, Marlene Dietrich, Sonny and Cher and Jimmy Durante.
Although it has no literary associations, our stop for refreshments at the Café Amelie on Royal Street is crying out for an inspired novel or, at least, a short story, for the house beside its garden-like forecourt was once the home of a feisty, 19th-century Princess of Monaco. Born Alice Heine, the beautiful daughter of a wealthy European banker (and great niece of romantic poet and philosopher Heinrich Heine), Alice first married a French duke and then, widowed, became the wife of divorced Prince Albert, heir to the throne of Monaco. After five years, she’d had enough of her restrictive life in the principality. Leaving her $5 million dowry behind, she decamped to London, where her salons became famous, attracting writers, painters and even a young Winston Churchill. Alas, she died in Paris at the age of 68 never to return to New Orleans.
Our final stop was at New Orleans’s literary fountainhead – Royal Street’s Hotel Monteleone. Among the literary greats it has hosted over the years have been Williams, Faulkner, Hemingway, Rice, Eudora Welty and John Grisham. Truman Capote even claimed to have been born there, which is a bit of an exaggeration – the birth was actually in a local hospital, although his parents were staying at the Monteleone at the time. Capote later lived at 711 Royal Street while he was writing Other Voices, Other Rooms and hanging out with the female impersonators at the nearby Gunga Den bar.
The hotel is graced by literary memorabilia and suites dedicated to Faulkner, Williams, Hemingway and Welty. And then there’s its Carousel bar, where the seating gently rotates as you sip your mint juleps and propose a toast to The Big Easy’s literary past.
