In Michael York's autobiographical book Accidentally On Purpose, he mentions attending the 1972 Venice Film Festival for a screening of Cabaret and running into Andy Warhol and company, including “the ebullient Sylvia Miles and the pony-tailed Joe D'Alessandro” there to promote Heat. York was being sought to co-star in a play called Out Cry (The Two Character Play) while its famed and nervous author, Tennessee Williams, was spending time as a judge at the Festival, staying at the Hotel Excelsior on the Lido. Also in attendance was Andy Warhol, Fred Hughes, and Rex Reed, all of whom flew over together with Joe.

The story I am about to relate shall be known officially as Joe's “Tennessee Williams Story,” and is offered for posterity here as he's grown a little tired of telling it. In fact, when I broached the subject, he told me, “I don't want to tell that story.” It turned out he was kidding, but I have a feeling that he thinks the truth somewhat less humorous than the version scripted by Dotson Rader in his Williams bio Tennessee: Cry of the Heart. (Rader was a close friend of Williams, as well as the author of the Rolling Stone cover story on Joe back in 1971.)

Let's get the probable myth out of the way first. Rader claims that Williams was sexually interested in Joe, to say the least. (That’s probably true.) He also maintains that the friendship or affection lasted for years and that Williams had tried to have a screenplay produced specifically intended for Joe. (More on that later.) Williams would refer to Dallesandro as his traveling companion and pontificated to the young man on such relative subjects as Sicily, beauty, and goats, all to which Rader says Joe listened “uncomprehendingly.”

Williams then reportedly confided to Rader that he had given Joe a lump of sob to swallow about how his health was failing and he couldn’t be left alone. So could the actor grant a dying man a wish, meet him in his room in ten minutes, and provide the pleasure of his company until he fell asleep?

The writer ran to his room, downed a bottle of mouthwash and awaited his prize beauty. When Joe arrived, Williams, dressed only in a silk robe, is said to have swooned, crying out to Joe that he was dying and begging the young man to hold him.

What happened, asked Rader.

Well, Joe held him all right--he held his hand. The playwright cried again. “Hold me!”

“I am holdin’ ya,” said Joe, still unfazed and clutching Tennessee’s paw.

So there's the tale. A cute one, too, even if Rader has the year wrong by setting it at the 1975 Venice Film Festival, hardly the likely venue for films released three years prior.

That may not be all that he has slightly askew.

Warhol's dictation for his April 11, 1985 diary entry indicates he bought Rader’s book and that there was “all this made-up stuff in it,” such as Edie Sedgwick allegedly performing oral sex on both guy and girl alike and then Tennessee Williams doing a fainting routine in order to get Joe to embrace him.

Here's how Joe remembers the whole situation which occurred while he was recovering from a nasty car accident suffered only days before his flight over:

“The time I met Tennessee,” he says, “I was doing a lot of drinking. We met down at the bar. Before I was even introduced by somebody at the event, he expressed that he was a fan of my work. But he didn't overdo it. He had a way of not making true contact when he talked to you, until such time as he was good and ready to make the contact. When you're famous, you must go through day after day of people coming up and being introduced to you, and you don't want every one of them to connect, because it would be too much for your mind. That's what he did with me. But somehow he also took note of who I was. He said, 'yeah, I like your work,' but not in a way that I believed it; just in a way of ‘okay, let's see what will develop.’ I told him how much I'd been a fan of his work, because I'd been introduced to it by Paul Morrissey. Paul had given me a story that Tennessee had written that he thought would make a great movie and he thought that I should do it. So he said I should ask Tennessee, let him know that I would like to make this thing called One Arm.”

One Arm is a Williams short story published in 1948, the year Joe was born, and was written a couple years before while the playwright was living in Mexico following the success of The Glass Menagerie. It tells the oddly touching story of a boxer named Oliver Winemiller, who loses an arm in a car wreck and thereafter becomes a dispassionate hustler, plying his trade until a gig on a yacht involving filmed sex turns to rage and murder. Winemiller ends up in jail and johns from all over the country begin writing him appreciative letters. For the first time in years, perhaps ever, Oliver Winemiller learns how much he meant to other people and experiences life-affirming self-esteem while awaiting the electric chair. Williams is said to have completed a screenplay*, which Rader notes would constitute the famed writer's only unproduced work written for the movies, and Rader further mentions that Paul Morrissey was to direct.

Joe says he never saw the Williams’ project get that far. Never saw a screenplay or even a treatment.

“I would have liked to have done it,” he admits. “But Tennessee looked at me and said, 'No, you're all wrong for that.' So I talked to him some more, and I notice he's watching the way I'm drinking. Now he's developing an interest. He's seeing that I'm slugging them down, not once blinking or even showing any signs of being high. I'm exactly the same way I was when I first came in. So he's watched me put down six of them and now he's a little impressed. The relationship develops and he becomes more open. ‘I really do like your work,’ he says to me. ‘Were you being honest with me about One Arm? Would you really like to do that?’”

As the conversation and drinking continued, a mutual admiration fostered and it wasn't long before a subplot developed.

“I'm liking the fact that he likes me and appreciates me, and I'm liking the fact he's admiring the way I drink. I'm admiring the way he drinks. It was something these two very different people had in common. Finally, out of nowhere, after drinking so long, he starts to go like this (stretches his arms), like he's getting sleepy, and asks me to help him up to his room.

“I'm thinking, yeah, he just wants to get me up there. I know he's going to make a play for me. Well, we're not up there fifteen minutes and he's on the bed--out. Cold. Gone. So, I guess he really was tired. He wasn't lying about that. So I left.”

It's tempting to “re-write” Joe's story in the manner Rader wrote his original, with the irony of a famous homosexual playwright trying to pick up a strikingly handsome young actor whom, much to the writer's outer admiration and inner surprise, is able to match him drink for drink, resulting in his passing out by the time he gets the knowing stud up to his room. Intellect's vanity often underestimates beauty's brains.

Re-reading One Arm today, I am struck by how much the tale anticipates a Joe Dallesandro. Joe doesn't particularly look like an “Oliver Winemiller,” especially as the character hails from the cotton fields of Arkansas in the original short story, but these are minor adjustments.

After the horrific loss of his right arm (there goes “Little Joe”), the young man “looked like a broken statue of Apollo, and he had all the coolness and impassivity of a stone figure.”

It's even easier to play the casting game by substituting Joe's name into the text: “(Joe) would remain in one spot and wait to be spoken to. He never spoke first, nor solicited with a look. He seemed to be staring above the heads of passers-by with an indifference which was not put on, or surly and vain, but had its root in a genuine lack of concern.” Sounds as much like one of Joe's early acting reviews than it does the manner in which Oliver Winemiller affected his corner of Canal Street in 1939 New Orleans.

The character would appear to have Joe written all over it, including a military career (though this would be his dad's and not his own), an early propensity for boxing (Joe's playground antics and street escapades made him the resident hard-ass), an initial identification as being very heterosexual, a tragic and debilitating loss (choose among many), a transforming phase as hustler devoutly wished and sex object extraordinaire agreed upon purely for the practicality, an object of sexual exploitation (Oliver goes into a rage and kills the man who films him in sex acts performed before an audience), and a young man at last coming to grasp and appreciate his powers as an object of desire.

The story ends with a visit to the jail cell by a young minister whose own desires for the beautiful one-armed youth are erotically linked to a recurring dream he had as a child in which he visited the zoo and beheld a golden panther that lapped at his naked body with its hot tongue, bringing shame and guilt to the young man who remembers it as powerfully erotic and therefore dangerous now that he is a man of the cloth.

Oliver senses the attraction and invites it, pleasing, teasing and mortifying the priest. When the one-armed Apollo goes off to the electric chair, he places the letters from his “men” between his thighs.

It is a strange and provocative tale to be sure, and it would have had to be “opened up” for the big screen, but it's not difficult to see lots of interesting possibilities there, particularly in the era of a Last Tango in Paris or Death in Venice. Paul Morrissey was right. Joe would have been perfect.

The screenplay was finally adapted to the stage in 2004 by Moisès Kaufman and made its world premiere at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago in December of that year, receiving rave reviews during its limited three-week run. More info on the production can be found here: http://www.tectonictheaterproject.org/OneArm.htm

[*As a postscript: the film rights were supposedly optioned in the mid-’90s and model/actor Tony Ward was attached to the project. Ward has quite the Joe-connection. He starred in Hustler White, Bruce LaBruce’s homage to Flesh, and did readings with Joe of a script called Flowers for Albuquerque that likewise hasn’t seen the light of a projector.]