Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation

by Mackrell, Judith

  In return for their devotion, Tallulah showered her fans with special, small attentions. At every curtain call she reserved her first smile and bow for the gallery, and the most loyal core, around twenty or so, she invited backstage to her dressing room, where she learned their names and stories. One of them, Edie Smith, became her secretary and perhaps her most loyal and reliable friend. Edie had both the serenity and the spirit to ride Tallulah’s scattered moods. She didn’t mind performing menial tasks – Tallulah always depended on Edie to open the brand-new tins of her favourite Gold Flake cigarettes – but she would not be bullied. When the two of them were drinking in a bar one evening, Tallulah spotted a handsome man and instructed Edie ‘to go get him for me’. Edie, whose own tastes were exclusively for other women, was unimpressed. ‘I’m not pimping for you,’ she retorted. ‘Go get him yourself.’36

  * * *

  In September 1925, the fantasy world Tallulah inhabited onstage reached new heights with The Green Hat, a play adapted from the bestselling novel by Michael Arlen. Arlen had something like the status of Scott Fitzgerald among British readers. His tales of playboys and socialites, his descriptions of clothes, cars and love affairs were all frantically fashionable. And while today his style reads like a hothouse of florid literary tropes and overwrought sexual suggestion, at the time his references to abortion, venereal disease and mild erotic perversion were daring – Arlen broke taboos for a literary living.

  The Green Hat was his most successful and notorious work. Iris Storm,* its heroine, was a young woman of vaguely déclassée status whose engagement to a young aristocrat, Napier Harpenden, is broken off by his family. Iris trails her broken heart through an apparently rackety lifestyle, eventually becoming engaged to a sporting hero, Boy Fenwick. Shockingly, Boy kills himself on his wedding night. And while the real reason is his shame at having contracted venereal disease, Iris chooses to defend his reputation rather than her own, by allowing everyone to believe that he died from despair at discovering she was not a virgin.

  Through all this, Napier continues to love Iris, but when he again offers to marry her, she insists that his family and friends will always despise her as ‘used goods’. The story ends with her striking a heroic blow against those ‘shams with patrician faces and peasant minds’. Driving her yellow Hispano-Suiza into an ancient elm tree on the Harpenden estate, Iris kills herself.37

  In some respects it was a very interesting role for Tallulah. Iris stood in a line of tragic heroines that went all the way back to Dumas’s Marguerite – a fallen woman with a heroic heart – and she challenged Tallulah to a new emotional range. Even more use to her, however, was the publicity surrounding The Green Hat from the moment it opened. Acted out onstage, Arlen’s plot and characters seemed more deviant than they had on the printed page, and when there were calls for the production to be banned, Tallulah shone in the scandal’s glare. To many people, Iris’s story blurred with her own, and they took as literal truth the claims of one critic that Tallulah ‘does not act Iris March, she is Iris March’.

  Certainly Tallulah was acquainted with Arlen socially, or as Hubert Swaffen put it, belonged to the writer’s ‘semi-exclusive set’.38 And this social connection lent weight to the speculation that parts of her own life had gone into the invention of Iris. The parallels between her own lover Naps and Iris’s lover Napier were much commented on, and Tallulah herself claimed that at least one episode, involving a swim in the River Thames, was taken directly from her own adventures.*

  If Tallulah benefited from the play’s publicity, however, she couldn’t stand the work itself. She found her lines almost unutterably pompous and Iris a humourless bore. Zelda and Scott came over from Paris and shared her dislike of both the production and (ironically) its author’s relentless self-publicity. Zelda wrote to a friend, ‘Just got back from bloody England where the Michael Arlens grow – hardy annuals it says in the seed catalogues.’39 Still, there was no doubting the play’s impact. The first-night audience for The Green Hat had been stiff with titles and celebrity: the Prince of Wales, Gladys Cooper, the Marchioness of Milford Haven (in a Russian headdress) and Lady Curzon were among the crowd at the Adelphi Theatre. A week later, when Beaverbrook took Tallulah to lunch with Lloyd George, she found the former prime minister in his living room, the floor covered with newspapers and all of them open at the pages reviewing her play.

  * * *

  The question for Tallulah now was how to build on her success. She still regarded acting as a serious vocation, and she wanted to transcend her flapper repertoire, yet her range remained largely unproven. Directors appreciated her peculiar gifts: the intensity with which she reacted to other actors onstage; the sparkling wattage of her performances; the rare ability she possessed of holding an audience in the palm of her hand. Bennett would write, ‘I have seen Tallulah electrify the most idiotic, puerile plays into some sort of realistic coherence by individual force.’40

  And yet nearly everyone agreed that she had little or no technique. Her diction was a continuing issue. Five years in London had muted her accent somewhat, but her delivery still retained husks of her Southern childhood, and it hadn’t been improved by her recent acquisition of what The Stage identified as ‘the modern drawl’.41 This was a vocal style made fashionable by the London crowd who in 1924 had been dubbed by Beaverbrook’s Express as the Bright Young Things. It was characterized by fantastically drawn-out vowels and barely articulated consonants; Daarling, sweeetie, loooovely were uttered as orgasmic sighs or gently rising shrieks. Yet what was de rigueur at a Soho party was a problem onstage* and Tallulah’s audiences found her lines increasingly difficult to hear.

  Along with her vocal manner, Tallulah’s reliance on certain physical affectations began to draw censure. At emphatic moments she would always shake back her hair; whatever character she was playing, her body assumed a fashionable flapper pose – back arched like a cat, shoulders drooping forward in a languorous slouch. Tallulah’s fans would not have her any other way, but critics saw her unvarying body language as symptomatic of a failure to fully inhabit her roles.

  Even her finest qualities, her capacity to fizz and burn up the stage, were controversial. The drama critic of Eve magazine said she could be relied upon ‘to discharge more emotion and give more of herself in one undisciplined half minute than almost any English actress can contrive in three acts of polite disturbance.’42 Others, however, disparaged this gift as mere exhibitionism – a specious trick of personality that Tallulah was unable to deliver, reliably, every night. Noël Coward’s former lover, Jeffrey Amherst, who had watched her closely in Fallen Angels, observed, ‘Tuesday she might give a performance that would knock your eyes out. And then Wednesday night go off, and Christ knows what might happen.’43

  In many things Tallulah could be a perfectionist – costumes and lighting mattered tremendously to her – yet in other respects her performances were slapdash. Dialogue that effervesced with wickedness could just as easily fall flat; it wasn’t acting craft she delivered, merely the mood of the moment. Josephine, taken to task for the same weakness, worked stubbornly to overcome it, but few considered Tallulah capable of the same effort. Basil Dean, who produced many of her plays, came to the final judgement that she ‘lacked a sense of dedication that alone could overcome her basic lack of training … approaching the theatre and indeed each aspect of her life as an experiment, quickly to be dropped when unsuccessful’.44

  Maturing as an actor would also require Tallulah to become more selective about her roles, holding out for parts that gave her depth or cast her against type. This she couldn’t do. Time and time again she returned to her default material, the glamorous fallen woman or the spirited working girl. In her defence, there weren’t many alternatives on the London stage, but she had also got herself into a situation where she needed to earn a great deal of regular money. Although her fees had gone up to £250 a week by the end of 1925, and would rise to £500 by the end of the decade, Tallulah spent her mone
y much faster than she acquired it.

  She was under pressure from her fans, too. The gallery-ites had exacting views about the material in which they wanted to see her, and by now it was becoming difficult for her to disappoint them. Tallulah’s next play, a slick and racy melodrama about modern marriage called Scotch Mist went down well, but the one that followed, in May 1926, met with unnerving disapproval from her fans. They Knew What They Wanted was precisely the kind of professional challenge for which Tallulah was ready. She played Amy, a young working-class girl from California who agrees to marry Tony, a sixty-year-old Italian winegrower. Amy means to be a good wife to Tony, but when he’s crippled by a bad fall, she yields to the temptation of his handsome foreman Joe. Temptation leads to pregnancy but, in a rare exception to the prevailing theatrical norm, the script doesn’t punish Amy with death and disgrace. Instead, it allows Tony to accept the illegitimate baby as his own, and Amy to return to her marriage.

  Not only was this story unusually nuanced for the time, the dialogue in Sidney Howard’s script was exceptional, compelling and poignant. Tallulah recognized its quality and was determined to do it justice. She went shopping for her own costumes, a wardrobe of modest frocks that totalled barely £6, unlike the Chanel gowns she had worn in The Green Hat, and spent hours talking through Amy’s character and situation with Glenn Anders, the broad, handsome American actor who was cast as Joe.

  Anders was impressed by her thoroughness: ‘Tallulah was trying her damnedest. She would do anything.’45 And many judged this to be the performance of her career so far. During the scene in which Amy battles between her conscience and her feelings for Joe, she evoked an anguished sexual hunger that, according to her fellow actor Cathleen Nesbitt, was far more raw and candid than Tallulah’s usual romping. At the moment when Amy and Joe finally touched, a little shiver went through her body that communicated itself to the entire audience. As Nesbitt recalled, ‘I’ve never seen anyone able to create such erotic tensions without any words.’46

  Almost every review concurred that Tallulah had fully transcended her usual ‘farrago’ of trash. James Agate praised her for ‘a piece of sincere emotional acting felt from the heart and controlled by the head.’ St John Irvine in the Observer high-lighted a ‘nervous intensity I hardly suspected her to possess.’47 That night Tallulah went out dancing with Anders at the Embassy Club. He was dressed in white tie and tails, she wore a long green gown, and catching sight of their reflection in the ballroom mirrors, Anders murmured into her ear, ‘God, we dance beautifully together.’ The Prince of Wales was in the crowd watching, and for Tallulah it felt like a perfect affirmation of her success.48

  Yet if she was getting the professional endorsement she craved, her gallery fans were sadly disappointed. Amy’s cheap frocks and drab marriage carried no appeal for them; the dialogue lacked any kind of innuendo for them to shriek over, and there weren’t the usual curtain calls at the end of each act, allowing them to demonstrate their Tallulah-love. After a few performances most had drifted away.

  Going onstage without the assurance of their presence was disorienting for Tallulah, who had never lost her old childhood terror of abandonment. And she would only risk alienating her gallery-ites one more time, when she took the role of Marguerite in a 1930 revival of Dumas’s La Dame aux Camélias. She was drawn to the role because of its associations with Sarah Bernhardt – still the legend by which she and her generation measured themselves. But she also intended this period classic to silence reviewers, who’d begun to jeer at the frequency with which she and her characters ended up in their camiknickers onstage: ‘Let them say I undress in that!’49 she retorted hopefully.

  Yet as the tragic courtesan Marguerite, Tallulah pleased neither her critics nor her fans. The long literary monologues she had to deliver, the confining crinolines and ringlets she had to wear, the pose of saintly self-sacrifice she had to adopt, were too alien. Tallulah admitted that she felt a ‘phoney’, and her fellow actress Joan Matheson said it was as though some ‘terrific vitality’ in her had been ‘crushed’.50 Normally Tallulah’s dressing room was the social heart of any new production, buzzing with drinks, laughter and impromptu parties, but her reviews for La Dame aux Camélias were so harsh that the rest of the cast kept their distance.

  No wonder she kept reverting to type. The critics might revile the predictability of plays that revolved around sex and cocktails, but the gallery never applauded louder than when Tallulah opened in Gold Diggers in December 1926, playing a feisty, cartwheeling chorus girl whose Charleston was acclaimed by Adele Astaire as the best she’d ever seen. When Tallulah played her final tempestuous scene in Garden of Eden (May 1927), dressed only in her underwear, she elicited nightly shrieks from her fans.

  Glenn Anders, who had grown close to her during the run of They Knew What They Wanted, was one of the few people to whom she confessed the vulnerability of her situation: dependent on her fame yet also trapped by it. She feared that most of the people who clamoured for her company were attracted only by the lustre of her celebrity. And yet she couldn’t resist making herself even more conspicuous. In late 1927 she bought a three-storey mews house in Mayfair, which she had designed in exquisite art deco style, silver paintwork setting off gold rug, pink upholstery and dark wood panels. There, she entertained on a lavish scale, inviting crowds of people to parties at which she served nothing but caviar and champagne cocktails. A young actor, Charles Bennett, who was invited to one, was astonished to see ‘all the big stars, the most famous people in England’ spilling out of Tallulah’s tiny drawing room into the kitchen and up the stairs.51 A party she gave for Ethel Barrymore went on for three days, simply segueing into yet another party that she’d arranged for yet another famous friend.

  Tallulah had set in motion a social cyclone. And even if she feared that it was all glitz and opportunism, she had no idea how to bring it to a halt. She was as caught by the mechanism of celebrity as Zelda and Scott had been in New York. One clear register of her éclat was the degree to which she was courted by the Bright Young Things. Obsessed with getting as much press coverage as possible, these aesthetes and exquisite rebels would tip off gossip columnists (often their friends) with the location of their next stunt: ramping up the extravagance and campery of every new costume ball. For them, having Tallulah on their guest lists was the surest guarantee that the newspapers would take an interest.

  So well known was she that if she went to the theatre as a member of the public, half the auditorium would get up to crane a look at her. It was gratifying to her ego, but even Tallulah recognized how unfairly it drew attention from the actors she’d come to see. In 1927 her celebrity reached its apotheosis. It was the year she was voted one of Britain’s ten most remarkable women;* the year that Oliver Messel went to a fancy dress ball dressed as the character she played in Garden of Eden; the year in which stories of her rumoured engagement to Prince Nicholas of Romania were reported avidly on both sides of the Atlantic.

  But to Cecil Beaton, Tallulah appeared to be turning into a parody of herself. He observed that the dewy sheen of her beauty had hardened to a more artificial brilliance: ‘Her cheeks are huge acid-pink peonies. Her eyelashes are built out with hot liquid paint to look like burned matches, and her sullen discontented rosebud of a mouth is painted the brightest scarlet, and is as shiny as Tiptree’s strawberry jam.’52 Her girlish recklessness had hardened, too, into something more predatory. It was by then an open secret that any handsome actor in the same cast as Tallulah would have to run the gauntlet of her sexual advances. One young man, invited to her house for tea, was placed directly opposite her as she sat with her legs spread and angled, so that he could see directly up her skirt. Godfrey Tearle, her co-star in Scotch Mist, was coerced into rehearsing a love scene of such blatant realism that his watching wife was reduced to tears. Basil Dean wrote later, ‘It was as if her Godfrey was being raped before her eyes.’ As she left the stage, Tallulah commented with callous joy, ‘Good thing I had me drawers
on, wasn’t it?’53

  The tone of her voice was one that would have been recognized, immediately, by Eugenia Bankhead. She had heard it throughout their childhood as Tallulah had channelled her insecurities into baiting and bullying her older sister. Even now, the old rivalries could still surface – and they did so with a vengeance when Eugenia arrived in London in the spring of 1928, announcing that she planned to join Tallulah on the stage.

  For the past few years Eugenia and her husband Morton had been living a nomadic life between New York and Europe. Much like the Fitzgeralds, they’d been travelling to escape their problems. Recently, however, their marriage had reached a point of crisis and Eugenia had walked out on Morton, determined to forge a new, professional life for herself. Initially, Tallulah hadn’t felt threatened by her sister’s decision to do this on the London stage. Although Eugenia had secured a part with unusual speed, as a dancer in Kenyon Nicholson’s new play The Barker, it was only a very small role. And Tallulah was confident that she had largely been given her chance because of the Bankhead name, a name she had personally made famous.

  Perhaps Eugenia realized that, too, which might also explain why she also deliberately set out to seduce the man Tallulah was seeing at the time. Tony Wilson was tall, blond and, just nineteen years old, was as overwhelmed by Eugenia’s flattering advances as he was innocently unaware of the trouble he would cause by responding. He had no idea that for Tallulah, Eugenia’s treachery would awaken the resentment she had suffered as a child, during all those years when her older sister had absorbed so much of their father’s love and attention.