Tallulah!
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“The word ‘legend’ gets tossed around so lightly these days that it’s a treat to bite into the life of a real legend, Tallulah Bankhead, a sacred monster and scandalizer who tore down the curtain between onstage and off. Idol of drag queens, first countess of Camp, sexual devourer of men and women alike, she drags her mink coat through the pages of Joel Lobenthal’s biography with the bravura that made her a star. It’s all here, the extravagant highs and the lonesome lows. Tallulah! earns its exclamation mark.”
—James Wolcott, Vanity Fair
“Joel Lobenthal conveys his passion for his subject on every page. . . . Scrupulous. . . . Insightful. . . . Rewarding. . . . Kudos to Lobenthal for giving [Bankhead’s] reputation a well-deserved makeover. . . . Move over Helen Hayes, dah-ling; it’s time that Tallulah Bankhead unseated you as the twentieth-century’s First Lady of the American Theatre.”
— Washington Post Book World
“[Lobenthal’s] exhaustively researched biography is the definitive, gloves-off evocation of the life of the brazen stage-and-screen actress so roundly ahead of her time.”
— Publishers Weekly
“Joel Lobenthal’s big new book . . . offers a tremendous reevaluation of Bankhead. . . . There is much fun and many randy anecdotes here. . . .A nostalgic reminder of an era.”
—Liz Smith, New York Post
“In this authoritative account of [her] life, Lobenthal succeeds in providing ample evidence . . . that Tallulah Bankhead was one of the greatest stars of the theater.”
— Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Though Lobenthal doesn’t skimp on the gossip (some of the anecdotes he’s unearthed will make you reel), he also gives his subject her due as one of the preeminent stage icons of the twentieth century. . . . Tallulah!offers a wildly entertaining journey through nearly fifty years of American theater.”
— Time Out (New York)
“Wonderful . . . for anyone who is a real theater buff.”
— Bust magazine
Introduction
Photos
PART I: 1902–1930
Lace Curtains · Debutante · Making Her Way · “I’m a Lesbian. What Do You Do?” · Madcaps in London · Naps · Risky Behavior · Modern Wives · Femme Fatale · Something Different · Skylarking · Sex Plays · Surveillance · Betrayals · Constrained by Crinolines · London Farewell
PART II: 1931–1939
Paramount · Hollywood · Gary Cooper and Others · “I Want a Man!” · Back on Broadway · Disaster · Recovery · Jock · Getting Married · Cleopatra Pissed · Serving Time in Drawing Rooms · The Little Foxes
PART III: 1939–1950
Triumph · Tilting Her Lance · Losses · Drama by the Kitchen Sink · Multiple Personalities · Chatelaine · Work and Play · Flights of Fancy · Bested by Brando · Public and Private Lives · Skidding
PART IV: 1950–1968
Mixed Highs and Lows · Stateless · Pearls Before Swine · The Hallelujah Chorus · The Nadir · Halloween Madness · In Retreat · Last Train · Home to London · Winding Down
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Bibliography
Introduction
When I began to research the life of Tallulah Bankhead as a college freshman, little did I realize that twenty-five years later this book would come to fruition. At that time I wasn’t really sure what kind of project would eventually result. But after my first research trip to London in August 1978, I became convinced that there was a need for a new appraisal of Tallulah that would acknowledge her often paradoxical emotional, sexual, and intellectual dimensions while also studying in depth her fifty-year career on stage, screen, radio, and television.
Armed with beauty, talent, intelligence, and social pedigree, Tallulah was a woman who lived without boundaries. She was perhaps the most controversial actress of her time. Her behavior so challenged social and moral conventions that the public’s reaction to her persona ultimately overshadowed her long and varied career. The prejudice of Tallulah’s era has been perpetuated in the biographies written to date. The conventional wisdom is still that her career was fatally compromised by her inability to do more than “play herself.” But this is actually what most stars seem to do: repeating, with variations, a consistent theatrical persona. We see this most obviously in film but also in the careers of great stage stars as well. Tallulah may have blurred the borders, but the criticism of this tendency throughout her career was likely exacerbated by disapproval of her offstage behavior.
I have attempted to avoid the moralistic tone that characterizes many chronicles of her career. The fact that Tallulah chose to act in plays that were primarily personal vehicles has been interpreted as almost an unforgivable sin. But this was again typical of most performers determined to be a success in commercial theater. While the plays she picked were rarely great, I discovered as I read through many of the unpublished scripts she had performed that they were more interesting and substantive than they have been widely portrayed. Today they transmit as fascinating cultural artifacts. And Tallulah’s roles fit a consistent profile that was emblematically alluring, humorous, autonomous, and unconventional.
Since most of these plays haven’t been staged since her final performance, I’ve attempted to recreate them. Quotes from these scripts and her reviews evoke her stage work and reveal the widely mixed and vehement responses she aroused. “The charge that they’re biased and prejudiced is of no consequence,” Tallulah writes about critics in her autobiography. “Criticism is the distillation of bias and prejudice.”
To some extent, Tallulah’s behavior, inexplicably bizarre as it often seemed, can be traced to the traumatic circumstances of her youth. Her mother died as a result of complications from her birth, while her father was depressed and drunk during much of her early childhood. She responded to the baffling and disruptive events of her childhood with a tyrannical need to control her environment. Tallulah and her sister were locked in a take-no-prisoners rivalry for their father’s attention; this may in part explain their compulsively seductive behavior with men. Tallulah became determined to win her family’s admiration by becoming a theatrical star, thus fulfilling a dream that both her parents had been forced to give up. After her father’s death, Tallulah clung to and broadcast the notion that he had been her guiding light during his life and beyond—her autobiography is dedicated “For Daddy.” But rather than simply accept Tallulah’s publicly expressed version of their relationship, as many writers have seemed to do, I looked directly at the letters they exchanged, and much to my surprise the truth they contained was a very different one. Tallulah’s worshipful postmortem surely was motivated in part by guilt over their troubled and in many ways unresolved relationship.
Attempting to set the record straight is another reason to revisit her now.
Tallulah had many professional failures for a wide spectrum of reasons—not least of which, I am convinced, was an underlying self-destructiveness fueled by guilt over her role in her mother’s death. Had she been a different woman, she might have made more of her talent, but the fact remains that Tallulah was not only one of the most colorful women of her time, she was also one of its most arresting theatrical personas. Being able to finally chronicle what she did achieve, as well as what she could not, has been as stimulating for me as I hope it will be to the reader.
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Part I
1902–1930
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Lace Curtains
“When I was twelve years old I used to think it was the best sport in the world to give impressions of my step-mother. At that time dad said severely: ‘The place for people to give impersonations is on the stage!’ and so the seed was planted.”
The opening years
of the twentieth century were a time of intense reaction in the American South, the inauguration of the Jim Crow doctrine of “separate but equal.” Amid an attempted restoration of the prewar civil order, whites who possessed any degree of power could live as if they were antebellum plantation owners. Statues of Confederate heroes appeared in courthouse squares. There was a new sense of identification with the settlers of the Old South, a nostalgic, recidivist affinity with the lost cause. Integral to this mood was a renewed investment in the prewar vision of the elite white Southern woman and her consecrated purity, passivity, and dependency. Yet bright women chained into the rigid and puritanical society of the upper-class South found ways to express themselves and to make waves. The words that came out of Tallulah Bankhead’s mouth would register shock to new extremes, but her dialogue had been primed by women talking out long before she was born in 1902. “All the Bankhead women were outspoken,” said Kay Crow, who married Charles Crow, son of Tallulah’s cousin Marion Bankhead. But it was the men who stepped up to public platforms. Tallulah was the first woman in her family to bestow her performances not just on friends and family, but to exhibit herself for pay—to seize a public pulpit.
She was named for her grandmother, Tallulah Brockman Bankhead, whose parents believed they had conceived her during a stopover at Tallulah Falls in northern Georgia. Tallulah Brockman married John Hollis Bankhead in 1866. He had served as captain in the Confederate Army, and to the end of his days he was called “Captain John” by the family. After the surrender he ran a cotton mill and was warden of a prison in Wetumpka, Alabama. Mrs. Bankhead had given birth to Marie, John Jr., and Louise before Tallulah’s father, William Brockman Bankhead, was born in 1874. In 1887, Captain John was elected to the House of Representatives, beginning a thirty-three-year career in Congress.
Both John and Tallulah Bankhead were formidable, but their styles were different. Mrs. Bankhead was driven around Washington by a liveried chauffeur. Captain John, however, devoutly took the streetcar every day to the Capitol. “Grandaddy would say ‘Ain’t,’ ” Tallulah recalled to author Richard Lamparski in 1966. “And my grandmother used to be furious.
She’d say, ‘Honey, Captain John, you know better than to say ‘ain’t’!’ He said,‘Tallulah—first of all, it’s an old Elizabethan word, perfectly legitimate; second, if I didn’t say “Ain’t” I wouldn’t get a farmer’s vote in the whole state!’ ”
Their son Will Bankhead was moody, high-strung, and nurtured theatrical ambitions that could not be achieved. Will followed his older brother, John, to the University of Alabama, where he was president of the class of 1892 and won a Phi Beta Kappa key, and then followed John to the law school at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
In 1897, he went to New York with two friends to set up a brokerage office, which limped along perilously. “My life in New York has been more of a struggle than I have heretofore known,” he wrote in his diary in January 1898. But he managed to attend the theater frequently, filling his diary with jottings on what he had seen, and he brewed with the desire to take his love of oratory to the theatrical stage. He happened upon an advertisement in a trade paper announcing openings in a Boston theatrical stock company, and coining a fictitious resume, he was hired. He sent word to his mother and left for Boston.
As a teenager, Mrs. Bankhead herself had enjoyed performing in private theatricals to raise money for the Confederacy, and as a young man, Captain John loved to recite Shakespeare with his neighbors on his farmhouse porch in west Alabama. But a career in the theater was not what they envisioned for Will. Sitting on the Boston Commons, buffeted by the winter chill, he read his mother’s letter demanding that he return. “And so I decided this little country boy had better go home,” he told Tallulah many years later.
Tallulah’s mother, Adelaide Eugenia Sledge, was “Ada” to her friends and family, but “Gene” to her husband. She was just as high strung as Will and just as keen on the stage. The younger of two daughters, Adelaide grew up in Como, a small town in northern Mississippi. She never knew her mother, who succumbed to infection soon after delivering her in 1880; her father subsequently remarried. Her grandfather had amassed a small fortune and he doted on his lovely young granddaughter. As a teenager, she was sent to Paris, returning with trunks full of couture clothes that rustic Como offered few opportunities to display. But Adelaide thought nothing of donning a Paris gown to trundle off down the dirt roads of the town.
Her education was slightly more ambitious than one would have expected of a woman of her time and class. At fifteen, she spent one year at the Salem Female Academy in North Carolina, which had been founded by Moravians in the eighteenth century. She took all the required courses: Latin, math—arithmetic, algebra, and geometry—French history, physical geography, and “miscellaneous,” which that year meant grammar, composition and dictation, natural history, penmanship.
Her father paid extra every quarter so that Adelaide could also avail herself of vocal lessons and a class in elocution, and Adelaide performed in several school performances. In the early 1940s, a classmate of Adelaide’s came backstage to see Tallulah and told her that she had inherited her talent from her mother, citing as evidence Adelaide’s ability to faint on cue whenever a certain young Moravian doctor appeared in her vicinity. Upon her return home, Adelaide soon had all the local girls in town arranged in tableaux vivants or dancing in the Grecian gambols that were the rage in the 1890s culture out of which sprang Isadora Duncan. In 1950, Tallulah received a letter from a Margaret DuBois Smith of Tuscumbia, Alabama, who recalled her friendship with Adelaide fifty years earlier: I well remember how she loved to doll up in picture hats and long dress[sic] worn at that date and walk about her bedroom—reciting poetry—and parts of novels saying “I am an actress.” I was thrilled in watching her. Her acting came so natural—no effort—She certainly missed her calling—then you came along to do what was in her heart.
But a dramatic career was all but impossible for a woman of Adelaide’s class. After becoming engaged to a rich Virginia planter, Adelaide was visiting one of her future bridesmaids in Huntsville, Alabama. She and Will met while she was staying at the McGee Hotel with two girlfriends. “It was truly a case of love at first sight,” he confided to his diary. He began visiting her on weekends at her aunt’s house in Courtland, Alabama. She broke her engagement to the planter and married Will in Memphis. The marriage came “to the great annoyance of her family,” Tallulah writes. However, her father presented the newlyweds with a magnificent carriage drawn by two resplendent chestnut mares.
Captain John and Mrs. Bankhead did not attend the wedding, but they seem to have approved of Will’s choice. “We send today a gift of love on your bridal occasion,” Mrs. Bankhead wrote Adelaide. “We extend you a warm enclosure in our family circle.” She signed her note “Mother and Father.” In a letter sent from Washington a day after the nuptials, she asked Adelaide to “write me a letter & describe your presents, it will give me great pleasure and tell me all about your wedding. . . .”
Will practiced law in Huntsville and was elected in 1900 to the Alabama state legislature. Adelaide and Will’s first daughter, Evelyn Eugenia, was born in January 1901, and Tallulah Brockman exactly one year later. Shortly after Tallulah was delivered, Adelaide contracted peritonitis, an infection of the lower abdominal cavity, exactly as her own mother had done shortly after giving birth to her. Margaret DuBois Smith wrote that Adelaide had summoned her and her sister: “She talked at length to us & looked so pretty—after three weeks of illness. . . .” Age twenty-one, Ada died the following night. After receiving Holy Communion from the family reverend, Ada spoke regretfully about leaving her infant daughter, then “seemed to trustfully submit to the will of God.”
The family and Tallulah herself liked to feel that she was destined to be someone to be reckoned with since conception. Years later, Tallulah produced for a reporter a letter her mother had written to her father:“From the number of kicks I feel, don’t r
ule out the prospect of twins.”
Will’s sister Marie later said that in her dying moments Ada had said to her,“Tallulah will never lack for friends.”
At this point Adelaide’s extended family seemed to largely disappear from Tallulah’s life, although Eugenia Bankhead later mentioned she had known Adelaide’s sister Clara Mae. Eventually a portion of the Sledge farm—now fallen on hard times—was bequeathed jointly to Eugenia and Tallulah, for whom Will managed it during the 1930s. Throughout her life, Tallulah treasured what information she could discover about her mother, but not much seems to have been available: “My knowledge of Mother’s family is sketchy,” Tallulah writes. For many years Will was so bereaved that he was hardly able to speak to his daughters about her.
The two girls were sent to live with Will’s sister Marie in Montgomery. Marie was married to Dr. Thomas Owen, who was archivist for the state of Alabama and a trusted lieutenant in the Bankhead reelection machine. They had a son, Thomas, who was eight years older than Tallulah. Marie wrote a social column for the Montgomery Advertiser. Kay Crow described her as “a wonderfully outgoing woman who would speak her mind about everything. She could just say things that would stop you in your tracks.”
For the next decade Tallulah and Eugenia lived alternately with Marie and with their grandparents in Jasper when Congress was in recess. Will was “disconsolate for years after Mother died,” Tallulah said in 1944. He stayed in Huntsville, salving his sorrow with liquor until he was summoned to Jasper to join his brother John’s law practice.
Tallulah declared as a child and an adult that she was her grandfather’s favorite of all his grandchildren, and she considered her grandmother a second mother, even addressing her as “Mama.” But Tallulah believed her father favored Eugenia. Eugenia was frail throughout childhood. When she was three years old, she came down with measles and whooping cough simultaneously, which left her temporarily blinded. She was treated by a Montgomery doctor who proscribed any exposure to sunlight. For months Eugenia was forced to play at night and sleep in the daytime; she was then taken to Washington for further treatment. By the age of six, her vision was substantially restored. But her sight was never very keen; and as an adult, one eye, perhaps as a result of a separate condition altogether, wandered noticeably.