For purely practical reasons, her most important new acquaintance was Olga Lynn: ‘The most divine woman,’ Tallulah enthused to Will, ‘and … a great friend to me.’13 Seemingly ageless beneath her powder and rouge, and more or less good-hearted under her social ambition, Olga took a maternal interest in Tallulah’s welfare, and that summer invited her to leave the poky service flat she was renting and stay in the large London house Olga had taken for the season. This move was a great relief. Actors in the British theatre were not highly paid – Tallulah’s own weekly wage was just £30 – and already she had run up large debts, her habitual extravagance exacerbated by her failure to grasp the pound–dollar exchange rate. It took her years to understand that £5 for a blouse was the same as paying $20–25 back home. To live for free with Olga, and be treated to servants, hot meals and hot water, was entrancing to her: even more so the company of her fellow lodgers, Gladys Cooper and Lady Idina Sackville, about whose latest divorce the whole of London was talking.*
At Olga’s she became something of a pet and a project. The three older women enjoyed her antics – Tallulah turned some of her first London cartwheels to entertain Oggie’s dinner parties – but they felt she lacked polish. Skirts were rising to mid-calf that season and dresses were cut on lines that made Tallulah’s curves look unruly and unfashionable. She was put on a diet and also taken to the showrooms of the designer Molyneux to pick out a few key items for her wardrobe. (Left to her own devices, Tallulah had little personal sense of style, and her motley collection of clothes was evidence of the variety of women she’d tried to imitate, from Mary Pickford to Ethel Barrymore.)
Olga also opened up her extensive social network to Tallulah. ‘To be a friend of Oggie’s is a liberal education in Who’s Who and What’s What,’ claimed the writer and music critic Percy Colson.14 During a late summer vacation she was introduced to the Cole Porters, Maud Cunard and the ubiquitous San Francisco hostess Elsa Maxwell. In London she made the acquaintance of Dawn Farrer, the music-hall singer, Duff and Diana Cooper and Ivor Churchill. Being on first-name terms with Ivor, second son of the Duke of Marlborough, and his mother, the former New York heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt, gave her the jaunty illusion of having arrived: writing to Will she crowed, ‘Not bad for a you-all miss from Jasper, Alabama.’
One of her favourite new friends was Sir Guy Laking (always known as Francis), a plump and petulantly amusing young man ‘of cloudy gender’ who adored Tallulah in a possessive, platonic fashion, twitted on the phone to her and sent her flowers. Another was Max Beaverbrook. The newspaper magnate had been quick to observe the beam of Tallulah’s personality raking across London, and with Diana now absent in New York, he judged her to be an interesting substitute face for his papers. He steered his journalists towards her; and while Tallulah refused his offer to lean on his drama critics on her behalf, the frequency with which her name and photograph appeared in the Daily and Sunday Express did much to accelerate her career.
Their friendship ran deeper than mutual self-interest, though. Like Diana, Tallulah admired Beaverbrook as an original: ‘A brilliant conversationalist [with a] remarkable memory.’15 And Beaverbrook was very good to Tallulah, inviting her to parties and country weekends, introducing her to everyone who mattered, from the playboy Aga Khan to politicians like Lord Balfour and David Lloyd George. It was one of the proudest moments of Tallulah’s life when she was able to introduce her father to these impressive acquaintances when he sailed over to London for a short visit.
* * *
Tallulah, the actress of the moment, was judged to be an entertaining trophy in such circles. However, after The Dancers closed, she struggled to find a new vehicle. In London, as in New York, good new plays were scarce, and during the following eighteen months Tallulah appeared in some perilously uneven material. In Conchita (March 1924) she played a spirited Spanish dancer, accompanied by a live ‘pet’ monkey so unmanageable that Tallulah had to invent jokes and turn cartwheels to distract the audience from its antics. In This Marriage (May 1924) she was a funny outspoken flapper in love with a married man. Her reviews were good – few actors in London could match Tallulah’s insouciance when delivering lines like, ‘Conscience isn’t like a liver, you can get on without it’16 – but the play did bad business at the box office and it closed after three weeks.
More commercially popular was the murder mystery, The Creaking Chair (July 1924). Yet it came nowhere near the triumph of The Dancers, and arguably Tallulah’s most successful performance during this period was in the evolution of her offstage persona. She worked as hard at it in London as she had in Manhattan, keeping her repertory of smart one-liners controversially stocked. ‘Darling, I couldn’t possibly go to the Marchioness’s this weekend, I’m so bloody tired of three in a bed,’ was one of her latest – a reference to the sexual preferences of the Marchioness of Milford Haven. ‘What’s the matter, don’t you recognize me with my clothes on?’ was a gibe first invented for a possibly uncomprehending earl, whom Tallulah caught staring at her during a dinner at the Savoy.17
She enriched her range of stunts, too. Moving out of Olga’s house and into a new flat in Curzon Street, she made a point of receiving her guests in provocative deshabille, and copied Zelda’s trick of hosting cocktail parties from her bath. Her terrible driving skills added to her notoriety. During her first summer in London she squandered £200 on a small green Talbot, but despite dutifully taking lessons, she failed to master even the basics of motoring. What principally defeated her was the illogical layout of London’s streets, and in genuine desperation she began hiring taxi drivers to guide her to her destinations. Of course, when the story was reported in the press, Tallulah was quick to realize its publicity value. To her already colourful reputation, she added the image of the delightfully incompetent motorist.
In subsequent memoirs and interviews she would confess to the fears she concealed behind her armour of provocative nonsense. ‘I was not as free of inhibitions as the casual observer might have believed. On the surface all confidence, all swagger and strut, inside I churned with doubt any minute the clock might strike twelve and I’d be back in a hall bedroom at the Algonquin or, worse yet, in Grandfather’s yard at Jasper.’18 Even at the time there were some who recognized how much effort she put into her seemingly spontaneous image. Sharp-eyed Cecil Beaton observed her arrival at the Eiffel Tower one evening and was impressed by the efficiency with which she worked the room, hovering at every table in turn, being ‘quick witted’ at each. ‘She has developed her personality to such an extent that she always seems natural. But it is only acting.’19
Most of London, however, was happy to enjoy Tallulah at surface-value. In a roomful of upper-class accents and manners, her American braggadocio reverberated with a delicious impact. Even the most morally blasé were taken aback by her willingness to deliver lines like, ‘I’ve tried several varieties of sex. The conventional position makes me claustrophobic and the others give me either stiff neck or lock jaw.’20 Tallulah had always pretended to be more sexually experienced than she was; now, in London, she was rapidly narrowing the gap between image and reality. With her family at such a safe remove it was easy to acquiesce to the many men who begged to take her drinking and dancing. Some were actors, but others, she proudly noted, were among Europe’s rich and titled: ‘I cut a great swathe in London … it was all a spur to my ego, electrifying! London beaux clamoured for my company … I rejoiced in this harum-scarum attention to the hilt, perhaps a little beyond the hilt.’21 She was now drinking regularly, as well as dabbling fashionably with drugs, and both might have contributed to what she called ‘my flings’. Her London beaux were also a way of compensating for Naps’ fugitive affections. Tallulah was genuinely enjoying herself and was in no hurry to settle down, but she had never given up her belief that one day Naps would make good on his promise to marry her. It nagged at her that after two years in London he had still made no attempt to introduce her to his family, nor suggested any hint of a futu
re plan.
Tallulah had no conception that marriage to Naps was never even a possibility. When his father had died in 1919 he’d inherited the Alington estate, and he took his family responsibilities seriously. If ever he chose to marry, it would be to a woman whose style and pedigree would enhance the Alington title. An American actress with a reputation for swearing and nudity would never do. Coming from New York, Tallulah didn’t see how immutable this logic was. Olga’s careful tuition had given her the illusion that society doors would be opened to her. ‘I can say shit, darling,’ she liked to drawl, ‘[because] I’m a lady.’22 The fact that Edwina and Louis Mountbatten asked to be introduced to her, and that the King’s third son, Prince George, came regularly to see her perform, made her believe she’d transcended the barriers of nationality and class.
But even if, in post-war Britain, actors, tennis players and newsmen could socialize with the titled elite, the underlying rules were no less implacable. When Diana’s mother, the Duchess of Rutland, was asked if Tallulah had ever been engaged to Naps, her reply was crushing: ‘Only she thought so. Napier was far too well informed of what he had to do for the empire to even consider it.’23
And so, stifling her uncertainties, Tallulah distracted herself with other men. One or two looked like serious prospects, including Michael Wardell, a handsome newspaper executive she’d met through Beaverbrook, who wore an intriguingly piratical eye patch. Most, though, were short-term diversions or, as Tallulah boasted, ‘ecstatic flings’, which rarely lasted more than a few nights. Few, interestingly, were with women. Tallulah knew the writer Radclyffe Hall and her sculptor lover Una Troubridge, and she was friendly with the lesbian hostess Barbara Bach. She was rumoured to have slept with the American singer Florence Mills, and she had a longish relationship with one of her understudies, a tiny, sparky gamine called Monica Morrice, who was ‘flat as a board, always naked in the dressing room … and didn’t give a damn.’24
Yet she didn’t identify herself as lesbian in the very public way she had in New York. She had taken against London’s more aggressively political sapphists – a clique dismissed by Cecil Beaton as ventriloquist’s dummies for their humourless opinions and mannish suits. When Tallulah had threatened to slap Raymond de Trafford for suggesting she was a sapphist, she wasn’t being coy, she was genuinely insulted. Principally, however, she seems to have found the sexual company of men more varied and interesting now – and worth taking risks for.
The first time she fell pregnant was sometime in the mid-1920s, and in a panic she turned to Olga Lynn. Oggie knew exactly what had to be done and who would do it, sending Tallulah to a nurse to have an injection of saline solution, then driving her to the house of a discreet friend. It was as slick an arrangement as could be managed, but nevertheless the abortion itself was a painful and dangerous procedure and Tallulah lost so much blood she was bedridden for two weeks. Still that didn’t prevent her from going through three more procedures by the time she was thirty, and from publicizing the fact with a defiant gallows humour, a raucous raillery that made them sound like badges of honour. ‘I’ll never go back to that place again,’ she said after one. ‘They aborted me with rusty nails and old razor blades.’25 She would never mention the clotted messes, knifing pain, humiliation and secrecy. As one friend, the actress Gladys Henson, observed, ‘She put on all the hard-boiled stuff all right, but she wasn’t really.’26
* * *
Aside from those two weeks of convalescence, Tallulah remained almost obsessively active on the London stage. Even when she knew a role was worthless she accepted it. To be out of work and invisible to her public was far more worrying to her than appearing in weak material. By early 1925, however, even she was aware that her poor choices of role were beginning to damage her career. She needed a part with ‘guts and swagger and shock’, and she accepted that she might have to take time off from the stage in order to secure it.27 At the forefront of her hopes was a play that had been successfully adapted for Broadway from Somerset Maugham’s short story, ‘Rain’. Its central character Sadie Thompson, a young prostitute who forms a complex bond with the religious zealot who attempts to reform her, had all the guts Tallulah craved. And when ‘Rain’ was scheduled for a London premiere, she was ready to go to any lengths to secure the role. Ignoring all the other new scripts that were being offered to her, she sailed to America to meet Maugham and to see the play for a second time, closely studying the interpretation of Jeanne Eagles, the American actress playing Sadie.
It all looked very hopeful. Tallulah was assured she had got the role and even took part in early rehearsals of the London production. Yet when Maugham came to watch, Tallulah seemed to him to lack personality, to be mimicking Eagles rather than finding her own way into the character and he demanded she be replaced. This was a level of professional and public rejection Tallulah had never encountered and it was as piercing to her pride as it was to her ambition. She couldn’t stand the idea that all of London would be talking about it, and it was partly to stage-manage the gossip that she returned to her flat, forced herself to swallow twenty aspirins and scribbled her suicide note, ‘It ain’t goin’ to rain no moh.’28
Twenty pills was nowhere near a fatal dose – simply enough to put Tallulah into a deep sleep and give her a bad headache the next morning – and even though she would dwell privately on the humiliation for several months, she was saved from more public mortification by a last-minute invitation to appear in Noël Coward’s latest play, Fallen Angels. Just a week before the play was due to open, one of its female leads had suffered a nervous breakdown and they needed to replace her. Tallulah thrived on this kind of brinkmanship, and having demanded – and secured – a weekly fee of £1.00, she zoomed straight into rehearsal with a vitality that a grateful Coward thought ‘little short of fantastic’. Aided by her photographic memory, she delivered a word-perfect performance on the opening night.29
The role was classic Tallulah material. She was playing Julia Sterroll, a young married woman who shares everything with her best friend: clothes, cocktails, even lovers. And if the material was a challenge to her vocally – the speed and nuance of Coward’s dialogue required a clarity of enunciation that occasionally defeated her Alabama accent – few actors could make a line sound as wanton as Tallulah. Responding to the accusation that Julia had become unhinged by alcohol, Tallulah’s ‘I’m perfectly hinged’ was delivered with a toss of her hair, a jut of her hip and an innuendo-laden catch in her voice that suggested a hundred forms of depravity.
Tallulah’s comic delivery was almost too effective on the opening night. With the pain of Maugham’s rebuff still stinging, she elicited howls of delight from the audience with her extemporaneous tweaking of the line ‘oh dear Rain’ into the knowing ‘My God RAIN’.30 And always inclined to boredom when a play’s run lasted longer than a few weeks, she found it hard to resist making more mischief. During one performance of Fallen Angels she replaced the ginger beer in the actors’ glasses with real champagne, generating an atmosphere of hilarity that grew ever more precarious with each scene.
Coward, convinced she was going to wreck his play, grew testy with Tallulah, but to her dedicated gallery-ites she could do no wrong. Theatre World now judged her to have a following ‘unlike that enjoyed by any other actress’.31 Most were clerks, shop girls, seamstresses or factory workers, and to them Tallulah and her characters represented a world of dreams. ‘Down there onstage she wears clothes that would cost a year’s earnings,’ reported Hubert Griffith in the Evening Standard. ‘She moves in expensive apartments at Paris, Deauville, St Jean de Luz, young men in exquisite evening dress are rivals in love with her. Miss Tallulah Bankhead is on the stage what every woman in the gallery in some degree wishes to be, the dream fulfilment made manifest.’32
Although Griffiths referred to Tallulah by her full name, she would have been recognizable to his readers by her first name alone. The gallery-ites had long called her nothing but Tallulah, chanting, ‘Hallelujah Tal
lulah, our wonderful Tallulah,’ whenever she appeared onstage, but now the critics and commentators were adopting the habit too. Arnold Bennett, who would write an entire column about the Tallulah cult for the Evening Standard in early 1930, found the phenomenon remarkable. ‘Why is Miss Bankhead always called Tallulah? Nobody except the privileged Hannen Swaffer [critic of the Express] speaks of Marie [Tempest], Gladys [Cooper], Sybil [Thorndyke] and Evelyn [Laye].’33
Even more extraordinarily, she was also being elevated into a verb. To ‘do a Tallulah’ or just ‘to Tallulah’ had become recognized shorthand for the brand of provocative exuberance she exemplified. As she airily explained to a New York reporter, deployed to track her British success, ‘Over here they like me to Tallulah, you know, dance and sing and fluff my hair and play reckless parts.’34
Her appeal remained a mystery to some. Bennett admitted he was perplexed by the dedication of her fans, who seemed ‘to belong to the clerk class’, yet magically appeared to spend half their working week queuing for tickets to see her perform, and to stand patiently at the stage door afterwards, to see her walk to her car. Exactly what these ‘bright youthful and challenging … girls’ gained from their devotion eluded Bennett, beyond the competitive satisfaction of being able to boast ‘to their friends about the number of hours they have waited for the thrill of beholding their idol’.35
Bennett failed to see the effort that Tallulah herself made to secure the loyalty of these young women. She never took for granted the money they paid, nor the discomforts they had to endure. All the seats in the gallery were unreserved, and on opening nights some of them would begin queuing forty-eight hours beforehand. Those who had to leave the queue to go to work (in answer to Bennett’s conundrum) would keep their place by chaining little stools to the railings outside the theatre, with their name tags attached. Those who remained in line were served tea by the theatre management and sold sandwiches and cake by street vendors.
Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation Page 27