From an early age, Tallulah demonstrated a boisterousness at odds with the codes of gentility. Zora Ellis, a former schoolmate in Jasper, recalled walking to and from elementary school with Tallulah; when Tallulah’s funny bone was tickled, she would fall to the sidewalk laughing raucously. Alternately, Tallulah could pitch tantrums so frightening that her grandmother would douse her with buckets of cold water.
“Never make yourself conspicuous,” Will counseled her. “It’s bad form, bad manners.” But on occasions he imparted a quite different and equally compelling message. When she was five Will took her to Birmingham to have her tonsils removed. During the operation the doctor accidentally cut into her uvula, to which one of Tallulah’s doctors later attributed the low timbre of her voice. As a reward for her courage, Will took her to a vaudeville show. A chanteuse sang songs that Tallulah recalled as “slightly risqué,” recalling the line “And when he took his hat I wondered when he’d come again.” Tallulah absorbed the songs and performed them later.
“Daddy was fascinated by my impersonation.”
Sometimes he would come home under the influence, wake her up, bring her downstairs in her nightgown, stand her up on the table in the dining room, and ask her to give her impersonation of the songbird. She loved being on top of the world: the dining room was only used for large family dinners. Will’s approval came in great gales of laughter. One night he came home with most of the University of Alabama Glee Club. Again she was summoned and again she performed.
At Sunset, the Bankhead’s late-Victorian wedding-cake house in Jasper, Eugenia and Tallulah poked around their relatives’ old clothes packed away in the attic, making up dramas to suit the costumes they found. Tallulah sought out a more public forum for performance from her earliest years. Among friends and strangers, she specialized in cartwheels, back bends, mimicry, and song-and-dance routines, and relished her roles in school performances. She read enthusiastically and her father’s love for Shakespeare inspired her to commit a number of soliloquies to memory. In a play put on by the fourth-grade class, Tallulah wore a kerchief around her head to impersonate a black mammy. “It wasn’t the leading part, but she stole the show,” Zora Ellis recalled, “and had every intention of stealing the show.”
But schoolwork presented problems. “I was too tense and restless to concentrate on paper,” she recalled in middle age. Tallulah’s outlandish name—said to mean “terrible” as in “mighty” in Indian dialect—was a handicap. “I used to hate it so as a child,” she recalled in 1966. “It would break my heart, because you’d meet kids and they’d say ‘What’s your name?’ ‘Mary,’ ‘Louise,’ ‘Virginia?’ And I’d say, ‘Tallulah,’ and they’d go ‘Ha, ha, ha,’ and you know how sensitive children are.”
Will and his father continued to hatch business schemes during their government career, yet success largely eluded them. “Daddy never made much money, either as lawyer or government servant,” Tallulah wrote. “He had no instinct for business.” Nevertheless they led a privileged existence; Democratic hegemony across the South guaranteed that sitting politicians were an elite. Labor was cheap, and Sunset swarmed with black servants with whom the family maintained close relationships that mirrored the prewar era. Will Bankhead recorded in the diaries he kept in law school and during a short stint practicing in New York a full allegiance to the big-otry of his time and place.
Tallulah’s friend Stephan Cole recalled that while Tallulah had “fish pride” about being a Southerner, she was ashamed of the way blacks were treated there. “I never went through any of that, thank God,” she insisted in 1966, revealing the enlightened liberalism of her family with the example of Willie Mae Gollach, daughter of the Bankhead’s cook, who was permitted to sleep on the sleeping porch with Eugenia and Tallulah.
Mrs. Bankhead’s strongest expletive was hussy, a word she considered so inflammatory that it could never be used in front of her grandchildren.
She told the girls that religion and politics were taboo subjects in a social setting, but at dinner with just the family Tallulah said, “that’s all we talked about!” Most of it was incomprehensible to her, but she recalled the mounting anxiety at home as election time approached. Then as now, it was not uncommon for Southern politicians to retain their seats for decades. A Democratic nomination all but assured election; nevertheless, competition for the nomination could be fierce. The Bankhead family never quite got over Captain John’s defeat in 1906 by Richmond Pearson Hobson, the young naval lieutenant who had been lionized for his conduct during the Spanish American War. The following year, however, Bankhead was elected to the Senate.
Recalling her childhood, Eugenia would invariably portray herself as the perpetual victim of her younger sister. Eugenia was “very meek,” as a girl, and by the time they were preteens, Tallulah weighed exactly double what Eugenia did. “I used to lock myself in the bathroom every time Daddy left until he came home from lunch,” Eugenia recalled. “If I didn’t she’d break into the room and be twisting my arm.” Eugenia kept a copy of a Rover Boys adventure story in the dirty clothes hamper and a blanket in the linen chest; “as soon as Daddy left I made myself a little bed and read until he came home.”
“All right, Nothin’ Much,” Will would say, “I’m home now; you can come out.”
David Herbert, a friend of the two Bankhead sisters, recalled being told by Eugenia that as children they were once each given a duckling.
Both girls took the pets to bed with them. During the night Tallulah discovered that she had rolled over her duck and killed it. So she put her dead duck in Eugenia’s bed and took Eugenia’s live duck, and put it in her bed.
“In the morning, Eugenia was given hell for killing the duck.”
“She’d say, ‘Let’s seesaw,’ ” Eugenia recalled. “I’d say ‘All right.’ ‘Let’s put this plank out of the barn window.’ She was so much heavier that she got about that much plank. And to balance it I got the rest of the plank out the barn window. I was having a wonderful time . . . sailing through the air, like a man on the flying trapeze. Her feet were just bouncing off the ground a little like that.” But once the dinner bell rang, Tallulah bolted into the house, and “there I was in the compost heap and Sister was at the dining room table.”
Following that incident, Will built a round seesaw for them. Tallulah told Eugenia to push. “Somehow it caught up with me,” Eugenia recalled,“and knocked me on the guinea pig cage, where I proceeded to step on a plank with a rusty nail.” In retaliation she picked up a discarded Coke bottle and hit Tallulah over the head with it. “Aunt Louise and Daddy rushed out to find us both lying covered with blood and guinea pigs.”
At night she would read to Tallulah by the light of a candle stuck into a Coke bottle. “When she was very disagreeable I’d read her The Hound of the Baskervilles, which is one of A. Conan Doyle’s most terrifying things. I’d say ‘Ooooohhh . . . ’ blow the candle light out and grab her . . . she thought the Hound of the Baskervilles had her by the throat.”
But the sisters’ mutual dependence was as strong as their conflicts. “We really loved each other very, very much in those days,” Eugenia recalled in 1971.
It would have been difficult for any child not to retain a terrible guilt about Adelaide’s death, while her father’s subsequent tailspin only served to heighten Tallulah’s feelings of culpability. She also learned from Will during her childhood that he had originally hoped his second child would be a boy. As an adult, Tallulah was partial to the color “baby boy” blue because she said it was her father’s favorite color; she connected that to his wanting a boy. Indeed, Tallulah’s lifelong usurpation of masculine stances and prerogatives could be interpreted as a subconscious attempt to give Will the son he had wanted.
Eugenia and Tallulah were deprived of Will’s active presence a good deal of the time and his behavior made them afraid that they could lose him, as they had their mother. Eugenia told Lee Israel, author of 1972’s Miss Tallulah Bankhead, that both girls had seen
him on occasion weaving round drunkenly, toting a gun and vowing to join their mother. Not surprisingly, Tallulah was an anxious girl. In 1928 she said that “the mere thought of policeman, burglars, and ghosts” during her childhood had ensured “a night of sleepless fear, half suffocated beneath the bed-clothes.”
Tallulah’s extraordinarily aggressive demands for attention throughout her life would indicate that she felt she had been overlooked and shortchanged as a girl. In 1964, when Tallulah filmed her final movie, costar Stefanie Powers was astonished at Tallulah’s ability to plunge instantly into a scene requiring sobs, bloodshot eyes, and a red nose, and then instantly recover her composure and her normal appearance. Tallulah did this not once but numerous times, as coverage angles of the scene were filmed.
Powers asked Tallulah what her secret was. Tallulah told her that as a girl she had taught herself to cry “because it was the only way she could get attention in the house.”
Her feelings of familial neglect were undoubtedly all the more pronounced when the family decided that the strictness of a boarding school would be good for the two sisters. In the fall of 1912, they were sent to the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Manhattanville, New York. The Bankheads were variously Methodist and Presbyterian, but Will insisted the girls be raised Episcopalian in deference to the faith that Adelaide had practiced, and so on Sundays in Jasper, they attended services at an Episcopal chapel set up in a loft over a feed store. Mrs. Bankhead did not approve of Catholicism, but Sacred Heart made sense because Will’s sister Louise was living nearby at the time and because there were few other boarding schools that accepted elementary-school-age children.
Sacred Heart was the first of five schools Tallulah would attend in the next five years. “We were always about three weeks late at school,” she recalled, “and left three weeks too soon, ’cause we wouldn’t come up ’till Congress adjourned or Congress convened, and so I always didn’t know where I was.” Tallulah had decided that she would not submit to Yankee ridicule about her name. “I didn’t realize, being very young, that you were registered in and naturally everything had to be applied and accounted for.
Students asked me what my name was, and I’d say, ‘Elizabeth,’ but of course the teachers—‘Madam’ they were called at Sacred—would say, “Tallulah Bankhead,” and I’d have to say ‘here.’ ”
“If you go to New York, please do not fail to see the children,” Will wrote his father in Washington. “They are awful homesick.” That Christmas, Will himself came to New York and took the girls to a Broadway matinee of The Whip, a blood-and-thunder melodrama replete with a simulated horse race and train wreck. The girls were stirred to such a frenzy that they wet their panties. A couple of months later, Louise took them to see David Belasco’s production of A Good Little Devil, starring Mary Pickford, with Lillian Gish in a supporting role. It was much quieter: a fairy tale transferred from the Paris stage concerning a blind girl whose sight is restored by fairies. It was then, Tallulah later recalled, that she made up her mind: she would be an actress.
At Sacred Heart, Tallulah acquired a facility in French, but her frequent transgressions of school regulations stood in marked contrast to Eugenia’s impeccable behavior. At the end-of-term commencement, the girls wore white veils and carried white lilies. Tallulah’s behavior, however, merited a short black veil and she was forbidden a flower. At the sight of Louise and Will, Tallulah burst into tears.
In the fall of 1913, Eugenia and Tallulah moved on to the Mary Baldwin Seminary in Staunton, Virginia. Tallulah’s cousin Marion, daughter of John Bankhead Jr., was attending and they would be close to their grandparents. However, more disciplinary infractions by Tallulah led to the girls being withdrawn in January 1914. “They could not fit in,” Marion Bankhead recalled in a letter to Lee Israel, and disrupted the other students by eating together in their beds late at night. Tallulah “resented the fact her acting ambitions were unnoticed” and she was turned down for the school play. In January, they transferred to the Convent of the Visitation in Washington, where Eugenia continued to outshine Tallulah.
“There’s no denying that I was the ugly duckling, thanks to my fat and my pimples,” she writes in her autobiography. Eugenia was “an excellent student, I was an indifferent one. Sister was the party girl. I was the home-body. She liked to be up at the crack of dawn. I liked to lie in bed and meditate on the future.”
In January 1915, Will married Florence McGuire, a Jasper native who had worked as his secretary. She was then twenty-five, fourteen years his junior. Florence McGuire was “a woman of charm and honesty,” Tallulah notes in Tallulah. But naturally she was resented by both Eugenia and Tallulah. In a 1922 interview Tallulah alluded to tensions: “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.” Yet Florence did her best to forge a relationship with the girls.
Eugenia’s illness had delayed her entry into school, and therefore she and Tallulah had always been in the same class. In the fall of 1915 the family decided that the girls should be separated for the first time. Eugenia was enrolled into Miss Margaret Booth’s school in Montgomery, while Tallulah was sent to the Holy Cross Academy in Maryland. Alone for the first time, she wept continuously for a month and refused to eat. “Aunt Marie gets a frantic phone call from my grandmother,” Eugenia recalled, “ ‘Get Eugenia up here, Tallulah’s starving to death.’ ” Eugenia was sent north: “Sister greeted me with joy. I think she probably ate half a hog that day.”
That fall the Bankheads suffered a tragedy when Louise’s son William Perry, a college student, died of walking typhoid. On November 15, Tallulah wrote her grandmother:
I received your lovely letter telling me all about the funeral and I also received a dear letter from Aunt Louise. It must have been beautiful with those lovely flowers but oh how sad. A boy so bright, so young and handsome to be snaped [sic] away in all his youth and glory. It must have been an awful shock to Ola [his fiancée] but dear Aunt Louise her sorrow is greater than any. In the middle of the night I find my self crying to think I will never see dear Billy again and oh I loved him better than I could have loved a brother. But we will all see him again in heaven but that seems so far off. Poor Aunt Louise she has had her troubles not in showers but in storms with just a little sunshine now and then but I am afraid the sun will never shine brightly as it did.
A year later, the girls moved to the Fairmont Seminary in Washington, which allowed them to move back in with their family. Tallulah lived with her grandparents, Eugenia with Will and Florence, in two apartments at 1868 Columbia Road in Columbia Heights, a fashionable district popular with politicians and diplomats. Tallulah began piano and violin lessons and played in the Fairmont commencement ceremony. For a time she even entertained the idea of becoming a concert musician.
Adolescence brought a remarkable transformation: Tallulah’s looks began to outshine Eugenia’s. Her skin recovered from a siege of acne. Her hair brightened into a vibrant ash blond that complemented the bright blue, almost sapphire-colored eyes she had inherited from her father. Her stepmother encouraged her to diet, and she slimmed down considerably.
In 1914, Will had made his first bid for the House of Representatives.
He was defeated in part because of allegations made about his drinking.
But although Will never became a teetotaler, his extended binge following Adelaide’s death was now finally over. In 1916, gerrymandering by the Bankheads led to the creation of a new congressional district from which Will now ran for representative. The same Hobson who had defeated Captain John had now shifted districts to run a campaign that announced itself as a crusade against the Bankhead machine. But this time the Bankheads prevailed, and Will began what would become twenty-four years in the House of Representatives.
Tallulah had made her theatrical ambitions known to the family.
Sub-merged in movie magazines, Baudelaire, and Madame Bovary, she paid no heed when Mrs. Bankhead began plotting an ambitious marriage. “Grandmother was very old-fashioned,” Tallulah recalled in 1938. “She wasn’t against the theatre, but she never could see why a woman should want to work if she didn’t have to.”
The teenage Prince of Wales was making a state visit to Washington.
Mrs. Bankhead insisted that Tallulah join her and the family to greet him at a reception. “Since nothing in the world was good enough for her Tallulah she felt fate had brought her my Prince Charming.” Tallulah herself was furious because it meant missing an episode of the serial The Exploits of Elaine, but her grandmother “was no one to monkey with, once she’d made up her mind.”
Washington’s bon ton lined up to pay homage to the teenage heir apparent, but were perplexed about the correct way to genuflect. Mrs.Bankhead elected to bestow upon the prince a curtsy that “brought her nose to the rug,” Tallulah recalled. “She seemed to be submitting her head to the ax. Her overlong salute blocked traffic for three minutes.” Florence Bankhead was daunted by her mother-in-law’s performance. “Billy, I am not going to curtsy to that little boy,” she told Will. “I’d just feel a fool and what’s more, I’d look a fool.”
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