Tallulah!

by Joel Lobenthal

  In its June 1917 issue, Picture Play magazine announced that it was launching a beauty contest that would award the winners a role in a film produced by Frank Powell, who was credited with discovering Theda Bara and Blanche Sweet, who were both at the peak of their fame. With her stepmother’s encouragement, Tallulah sent in a photo. The results were announced in the September issue. Tallulah’s photograph was reproduced along with eleven other winners. But Tallulah had neglected to write her name on the photo she submitted, and her application and envelope had been lost. She sent in a duplicate photo to prove her identity.

  In 1919, Photoplay interviewed Mrs. Bankhead, who recounted Will’s ambition to go on the stage. “However, I stopped him before he got very far. He was studying law and I wanted that to be his profession. But the ambition of her father that I nipped in the bud broke out in Tallulah, who has always been perfectly determined to be an actress. She had promised to wait until she was older . . . but things happened that just took matters right out of our hands.”

  “The family thought that if I had no talent the best cure would be to let me on the stage,” Tallulah explained in a 1921 interview, “and if I really had talent, why the stage was the place for me.” It seems, too, that any qualms Will might have had would only have subjected him to accusations of hypocrisy from Tallulah. He had continued to encourage her interest in the theater, taking her since she’d starting attending schools in the D.C.area to performances by the resident stock company at Polit’s Theatre as well as at Keith’s vaudeville house. Furthermore, in 1915, Lois Wilson, an Alabama native, had won at age nineteen a beauty contest that launched her on a career in silent films. Will had been one of the contest judges. Tallulah also remembered the contest and later referred to Wilson as “my father’s godchild.”

  Captain John’s was the deciding vote. He “never objected to my acting,” Tallulah explained years later. “To him it was just another public career; it was carrying on the Bankhead name.”

  “He was the finest judge of character I ever knew,” Marie recalled in 1931, “and he had every confidence that Tallulah had a force in her from her very childhood.” He, too, was given to theatrical gestures. “When the more conservative members of the family hesitated about giving approval to her ‘going on the stage,’ ” Marie recounted with an equal flair for effect,“the old man, with flashing eyes, and emphatic gesture declared: ‘Stand back, all of you. This is my job. Tallulah shall have her chance!’ ”

  At fifteen, Tallulah put formal schooling behind her and left for New York.

  Debutante

  “I am going to make good with a bang! Wait and see. Then you will be proud of your bad little girl with her bad little temper.”

  Achaperone for Tallulah was mandatory, and it had been decided that Aunt Louise would accompany her to New York. Louise was now separated from her second husband, Arthur Lund, with whom she had lived in New York, but Lund was still living there and they remained in close contact. Louise’s surviving child, a girl, was now married. Louise was racked with guilt over her insistence that her late son had been too young to marry his sweetheart, Ola Davis. And so she brought Ola to New York as well, hoping to launch her on a singing career. The three moved into an apartment at 341 West Forty-fifth Street, adjacent to the midtown theater district. Louise was preoccupied, too, with the possibility of communicating with her dead son and she insisted that Tallulah and Ola regularly accompany her to spiritualist meetings.

  The promised movie contract in a Frank Powell production turned out not to be a Frank Powell production at all because Powell had gone bank-rupt. Instead Tallulah was going to appear in a Mutual Film Corporation production directed by Dell Henderson entitled Who Loved Him Best?

  Miraculously, the film survives at the Library of Congress in excellent condition. Watching it today, one would never know that this was Tallulah’s professional acting debut. She looks as if she had been acting all her life.

  The film stars Edna Goodrich, at the time one of Mutual’s leading actresses. She plays movie star Dora Dane (a flashback shows her discovery in a garment factory). Dora rejects a producer’s marriage proposal because she is in love with a young sculptor, George Steele. Steele is convinced that he’s burned out and fritters away his time with bohemian amusements.

  Dora campaigns to get George back to the grindstone while contending with a rich widow who enjoys patronizing young artists and who seems to have designs on George.

  Tallulah plays “Nell,” one of George’s bohemian friends. Her role is peripheral to the plot, but she is front and center screen in several scenes. She is first seen at an art gallery opening, enthusing with friends over the works on display. Next she gets a sequence all to herself, running up the stairs to George’s studio ahead of her friends. She pauses at his door, satisfies herself that he’s home, and then bursts in to congratulate him. Rather than bursting in, one could just as easily say bouncing in: throughout the film Tallulah evinces many stylistic hallmarks of the adorably impulsive World War I ingenue. Commanding the screen alone outside George’s studio, she magnetizes the viewer and rewards the camera’s scrutiny.

  Once inside George’s studio, Nell finds that he is talking with Dora, who is irate when Nell’s friends troop in boisterously. “You pretend to be his friend but you want to ruin him,” Dora insists, and shows the lot of them the door. Dora is determined that George buckle down to work on an entry for a sculpture competition on the theme “American Militant.”

  In a later scene at the “Greenwich Village Bazaar,” Tallulah as Nell wears a harlequin costume, blows on a tin horn, kicks up her heels, and perhaps overdoes her madcap vivacity just a bit. By contrast, in the climactic scene she skillfully subdues herself: Dora, furious at finding George and the widow kissing at the Bazaar, has smashed his competition statue before the startled gaze of Nell and her friends. Then Dora reveals that it is really an identical statue created by George’s best friend, who has been secretly copying his work. Nell and her gang listen in astonishment to Dora’s confession, then file out buzzing about what has just happened. George and Dora are left alone in an embrace at the final fade-out.

  Who Loved Him Best? didn’t receive much attention when it was released in February 1918, just after Tallulah’s sixteenth birthday. It was one half of a double bill at the New York Theatre on Forty-fifth Street and Broadway. “That just tells about what sort of film this is,” Variety snickered.

  A fascinating artifact today, it was then only one in an avalanche of five-and six-reel feature films flooding the market. Tallulah’s family realized as much and were willing to stake her for the longer haul. Will wrote, “My dearest Tallulah: You are certainly going at this thing like you meant business and I am betting on you and backing you to my limit. . . .” But the primary backing still came from Captain John.

  Tallulah had been paid twenty dollars a day for her work on Who Loved Him Best? However, she tore up her first paycheck “because I thought it a terrible thing to be paid for doing something that I had enjoyed.”

  Louise picked up the pieces and tried to tape the check back together. Financial security was “not a Bankhead characteristic,” Louise’s sister Marie would say in 1932.

  Tallulah claimed that Louise was more interested in furthering Ola’s career than her own. But Ola herself was much less ambitious and soon returned to Alabama. Looking for a smaller apartment, Louise steered her niece to the Algonquin Hotel on Forty-fifth Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Tallulah later claimed that Louise had no idea that the Algonquin was the city’s leading theatrical watering hole, but Tallulah suddenly found herself at the hub of Broadway and the film industry. A constellation of New York’s sharpest and cruelest wits—known as the Algonquin “Round Table”—held court in the dining room at lunch. At after-theater supper, the lobby and dining room were filled with performers eating after their shows. Many stars also lived there or kept apartments there to rest in on matinee days. Tallulah was afraid that starchy Louise would im
mediately relocate when she realized what she had stepped into; however, Louise “enjoyed the floor show as much as I did,” Tallulah recalled of that passing parade of celebrities.

  A letter from Mrs. Bankhead to Tallulah survives that must have been written soon after Tallulah and Louise settled at the Algonquin. It is an extraordinary jumble of anxious injunction, pedestrian news, religious fervor, and homiletic counsel: “Precious heart,” she advised Tallulah, “be unselfish and do as many little acts of kindness as possible, and it will in return bring joy to you.” Eugenia, who was preparing for her coming out, was about to take dance lessons every Friday night. But Washington was snowbound, and as a result Mrs. Bankhead was going out very little. New York, she could have assumed, would only be more frigid. “Keep your feet well protected, for fear of dread pneumonia. My beautiful sister at 23 died in 3 days. . . .” She implored Tallulah to “dedicate your spirit to God, our heavenly father.” She felt sure that her dead grandson William Perry, Louise’s son, was “in his Heavenly home where no harm can come to him.”

  The Bankheads did their best to rally support for Tallulah by writing letters to a network of business contacts in New York. Tallulah put her political training to work to ingratiate herself with the celebrities populating the hotel: she ogled, and all but stalked, her favorite stars. Ann Andrews had been born into West Coast society and was enjoying a success on the Broadway stage. “I instinctively liked her the minute I met her,” Andrews recalled in 1982, “and she was so intelligent and so amusing that we became great friends.” Andrews was impressed by Tallulah’s thirst for knowledge, a drive completely independent of her failures at school. “Everyone has an aura,” Andrews related, “and Tallulah had an aura of the mind—extraordinary.” Tallulah’s conversation, her grasp of current events, was impressive. “She always knew everything that was going on,” Andrews recalled. Straitened by her small allowance, Tallulah went to local news-stands and asked, “May I borrow this?” Publication by publication, she worked her way through that week’s crop. Tallulah was at that time “without a doubt the healthiest human being I have ever known,” Andrews recalled. “Her vitality was just unheard of. When she started in New York it seemed her feet could hardly stay on the ground.”

  After weeks of pursuing leads, Tallulah finally found work. She was summoned by the Schubert office to play a silent role, a “walk-on,” in The Squab Farm, a new play by husband and wife Fanny and Frederic Hatton, a popular playwriting team. The Hattons’ Lombardi Ltd., a farce set in the fashion world, was currently enjoying a long run. The Squab Farm sent up the foibles of the movie industry. Lowell Sherman played an unscrupulous director, and Alma Tell was a star who shocked her studio by refusing to put on a revealing costume for the camera. Tallulah was “Gladys Sinclair,” one of a flock of young starlets, toothsome young chicks at the squab farm.

  She was lonely and disoriented during the tryouts in Connecticut and New Jersey. Ignorant of one of the theater’s oldest superstitions, she whis-tled in the communal dressing room and was rebuked severely by her roommates. Julia Bruns, who played the role of a temperamental film diva, took pity on Tallulah and invited her to share her dressing room, which further alienated Tallulah’s colleagues.

  On March 13, The Squab Farm opened in New York at the Bijou Theatre on Forty-fifth Street, next door to the Morosco, where Lombardi Ltd.was ensconced. Three days later, Tallulah had nothing but glad tidings to report to her grandmother: “Your little namesake is now a full fledge [sic]actress. I have made my debut on Broadway and am so crazy about the stage. I have just returned from the matinee and I can’t wait to go back for the evening performance.”

  A portrait of Tallulah was published in the March 17 edition of the Sunday Morning Telegraph, headlined SOCIETY GIRL GOES ON STAGE. As thrilled as Tallulah was, the publicity did as much harm as good, for there is probably nothing more handicapping for an actress than to look like a society dilettante. Furthermore, the piece described her as the star of The Squab Farm, which did not go over at all well with Alma Tell.

  Theatre magazine reported that in The Squab Farm, “the selfishness, vanity and rapacity of the idols of the screen were laid bare with unflinching realism and rare comic verve.” But the play closed after four weeks.

  Photoplay stated that it was precisely that irreverence that doomed the comedy. “The fans didn’t like to see their screen idols burlesqued, even by the privileged Hattons.”

  Tallulah believed that the curtain had also rung down on her theatrical ambitions. However, Russian director Ivan Abramson had seen the play and offered her a part in his picture When Men Betray. In it she played a woman raped by her sister’s fiancé. It was released in June. Motion Picture News reported that “as the foolish girl rudely awakened,” she had acted“with sincerity and feeling.” Tallulah was ecstatic at a mention by Harriet Underhill of the Tribune. “Miss Tallulah Bankhead is new to the screen and she proves the truth of the theory that brains are better than experience.”

  Tallulah’s career in silent films had been launched. Scouting for a leading woman for his new star, Tom Moore, Samuel Goldwyn found Tallulah and hired her for Thirty a Week, in which she played a wealthy girl in love with her family’s new chauffeur. Released in October 1918, Thirty a Week was quickly dismissed, but Tallulah and Moore were commended by Moving Picture World for their “excellent acting.”

  During the final months of World War I, Louise decided to join the Red Cross in Europe as a nurse’s aide. Marie was sent up to New York to oversee Tallulah, and accompanied her on a round of interviews with film executives in December. The family insisted Tallulah return with Marie to Washington for Christmas. In Washington, Bobby Carrere—“the great beau of Washington, he couldn’t make up his mind about Sister or me”—took Tallulah to see James Barrie’s bittersweet fantasy Dear Brutus.

  Eighteen-year-old Helen Hayes had a prominent role. Tallulah had first seen Hayes act with a stock company in Washington; she was envious that Hayes had been onstage since age six.

  The Bankheads allowed Tallulah to return to New York unsupervised only after Will came and conferred with Frank Case, owner of the Algonquin. She was given an allowance of fifty dollars per week, of which twenty-one dollars went toward her room at the hotel. Will told Case that if Tallulah was not in by midnight she was not to be allowed in until morning. “One night, there was a ring at my bell,” Ann Andrews recalled with a chuckle. “And there was Tallulah. She’d been locked out. Could she spend the night with me?”

  It was at the Algonquin that Tallulah first met British actress Estelle Winwood, who remained one of her closest friends until the day she died.

  Winwood had emigrated to New York in 1916 to appear in a play called Hush and had immediately established herself as a Broadway favorite. One night over supper at the Algonquin she went over to say hello to Ethel Barrymore. “And there was this Tallulah,” Winwood recalled in 1982. “And I looked at her in astonishment. I’d never seen anybody so pretty. I said,

  ‘Oh, my God—who are you?’ ” Tallulah informed her that she’d seen her latest play sixteen times.

  Several nights later, Winwood was attending a party in an Algonquin suite. She was the last guest to leave, when the host “got me by the wrist and pulled me back and said, ‘Oh, no, you don’t, Estelle.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Oh, no, you’ve been kidding me, and flirting with me the whole evening, you’re not going.’ I said, ‘How dare you.’ You know, very British . . . as though I was the most important person in the world.

  Well we had a fight and I kicked and screamed and he carried me to his bedroom and he got me on that bed and he had an affair with me.”

  It was three o’clock in the morning, and she was afraid of a pregnancy, and asked herself whom she knew in the hotel who could help. She remembered the name Bankhead and knocked on Tallulah’s door. Tallulah was awake and invited her in. “I don’t know whether you’ll like me to come in, when I tell you what I’ve come for.” Winwood asked
if she had a douche bag; Tallulah didn’t know what she meant. In that case, Winwood said, did Tallulah have an enema bag? As it turned out she did. Winwood explained what had just happened and Tallulah showed her to the bathroom. “I had a good washout and then I said ‘Goodnight’ and that was the beginning of a great friendship.”

  “I molded her in a way to get into being Tallulah Bankhead,” Winwood claimed, “which she never would have been if it hadn’t been for me.” Perhaps Winwood exaggerated her influence—but there’s no question that her impact on Tallulah was genuine. Tallulah was eighteen years younger,“and she used to take notice of what I said. I terribly often bullied her, told her she was a fool. And she didn’t mind at all. Thought she was, I think.

  And so she always would do something that I would advise her.”

  Jobyna Howland was another older actress who assumed something of a motherly role toward Tallulah. Howland usually played character roles in comedy and went on to give some priceless renditions of comic battle-axes in films in the early 1930s. Six feet tall, Howland possessed a wind-in-the-chimney voice from which issued commands that the most stalwart might find hard to resist.

  Over the holidays in Washington, Tallulah had insisted that the family buy her a low-cut evening gown in which to shine at parties, but attending the theater with Bobby Carrere, Tallulah lost her nerve and wouldn’t remove her wrap all evening. So did her behavior during these early days at the Algonquin swing between extremes. “She behaved so madly stupidly,”

  Winwood complained. “Like for instance, you’re sitting here on this sofa, and there might be three other people over there, and she’d come in and flounce around. What for? Nobody cared about her then. She wasn’t Tallulah Bankhead. She was just a girl.” Tallulah craved attention, and her posturing and posing made sure she was noticed. Yet part of her wanted to be looked at so that she could hide, disappear, as it were, behind the facade her flamboyant behavior constructed. She insisted on reaping a particular type of boggled attention that could deflect a natural shyness many people would notice over the course of her life.