By day Albee would work on his poetry and try to make progress on his novel. When they went out at night, he drank for pleasure, but eventually it became his “writer’s habit,” as he referred to it. “Flanagan and Albee shared a weakness for alcohol and melancholy,” writes Christopher Bram in Eminent Outlaws. “They were known in the downtown gay bar circuit as the ‘Sisters Grimm.’ The Sisters Grimm were regulars at the San Remo, at Julius’s, and at The College of Complexes.” At one hangout, Lenny’s Hideaway, Albee and Flanagan were known as “the two owls, because they stared straight out,” said Heide. “When I think of Flanagan and Edward, I think of all that anger and rage.” While Heide believed that the tension was due, in part, to jealousy on both sides as a result of the promiscuity, Albee maintained that the reason he never smiled in those years was because he had such bad teeth. Nevertheless, Rorem agreed that the element of anger between the boyfriends created “a feeling of danger” for the people around them.
Albee was lucky to have friends like Auden and Howard, who read his poetry and gave him comments. Once, he and Flanagan met with the playwright Thornton Wilder, by then the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth. After a tepid critique of Albee’s poems, Wilder suggested that he write plays instead, changing the course of the younger man’s life.
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