10
Popular Culture Review
You’re going to be on the speaker’s platform with me, you on
one side and Tom Junior on the other, to scotch these rumors
about your corruption. And you’re gonna wear a proud happy
smile on your face, you’re gonna stare straight out at the
crowd in the ballroom with pride and joy in your eyes.
Lookin’ at you, all in white like a virgin, nobody would dare
to speak or believe all the ugly stories about you. I’m relying a
great deal on this campaign to bring in young voters for the
crusade I’m leading. (53-54)
Like the Nixon described in Williams’s letter of October 2, Boss Finley is a
“pitchman,” “unshriven and unconfessed,” who has the savvy to use national
television to showcase his united and loving family, really a front to conceal the
image of himself and his dangerous political agenda. On the other hand, the
ruthless senator in The Red Devil Battery Sign (1975) puts his rebellious
daughter away, “in a private school for disturbed children, more like an
institution” (335). Grown up, the daughter called Woman Downtown confesses,
“I never saw him again except on political newscasts” (336). This politician
would allow no one, not even his daughter, to tarnish his public image projected
on television.
Elsewhere, too, in the Williams canon television is linked to destructive
illusions. A television set figures prominently, for instance, in Brick Pollitt’s
bedroom in Cat on a Tin Roof{ 1955). Trying to escape the mendacity he sees all
around him, including the lies he tells himself about his relationship with his
dead gay friend Skipper, Brick repeatedly retreats to a “huge console
combination o f radio-phonograph (hi-fi with three speakers) TV set and liquor
cabinet” (Cat 6). Commenting on this key prop, Williams claimed: “This piece
of furniture, this monument, is a very complete and compact little shrine to
virtually all the com