Her poses and her pranks earned her the affectionate condescension of the Algonquin Round Table. “I was in a way sometimes kind of their pet,” Tallulah recalled in 1966, “ ’cause I was such an idiot. I put on this big act; I was so nervous all the time they thought I was putting on airs, and it was sheer nerves.”
She experimented with her look, patterning her appearance after who-ever was her idol of the moment. Tallulah had decided that Mary Pickford’s ringlets could look well on her and submitted her thick wavy hair to be coiled into Pickford’s sausage curls. Permanent waving was in its infancy and the result was rather crude. Casting managers “said that she didn’t look right,” Dorothy Dickson recalled in 1982. Dickson and Carl Hyson were a very popular husband-and-wife ballroom dance team, who performed in their own “Palais Royale” nightclub and on Broadway. They lived at the Algonquin. “I took her to Ziegfeld”—Dickson danced in the Follies of 1917 and 1918—“but Ziggy wouldn’t have anything to do with her. He just wasn’t interested at all.”
Early in 1919 Tallulah spent two weeks with a stock company in West Somerville, Massachusetts, which played twelve performances of a different play each week. On February 9 she wrote Captain John from the Hotel Woodbridge, describing her plunge into a grueling work schedule. She had already opened in a new role the previous Monday afternoon, with only nine hours of rehearsal. She was rehearsing the role of a French girl for the following week’s offering while performing the first play at night.
Rehearsals were nine to twelve noon, followed by a lunch break, a matinee, dinner, and then an evening performance. “I am nearly dead now. . . .” she wrote. She had been asked to stay on for the balance of the season but protested that the work would “kill me.” She said, too, that the management wanted her to replace the current leading lady, who had befriended her.
West Somerville was clearly too far from the Great White Way for Tallulah’s comfort. Yet Somerville was “a very large place as far as people go but no conveniences at all. I have a room in the only hotel here which is the tourist home. No private bath. I climb three flights of stairs. There is nothing here at all but I am working very hard for the experience. . . .”
Back in New York, Tallulah won a role in a new film, The Trap, which was released at the end of the summer. The film was one more undistinguished melodrama, this time starring Olive Tell, whose sister Alma had starred in The Squab Farm. In The Trap, Tell plays a schoolteacher who unwisely marries a Yukon gambler. He is a heel who uses her sister, played by Tallulah, as a pawn to wreak havoc on his wife.
While filming The Trap, Tallulah was instructed to have dinner with a family named Cauble every evening when she got back from the studio.
Mrs. Cauble was miffed that Tallulah would not accept her suggestions that she spend the night. “I felt that she got to the hotel in time to have supper with ‘Jobena’ [Howland] (some actress) and her looks prove to me that she has kept late hours.”
Aunt Louise had returned from overseas late in 1918, after a surfeit of relief workers in Italy scuttled her plan to serve with the Red Cross. She would subsequently write her father: “I wish to do all the good I can—that I may build my future life as high and happy as possible.” Now she determined to make Tallulah the object of her good works, but Tallulah herself had other ideas. James Julian, a friend of the Bankhead family whose office was just down the block from the Algonquin, insisted on monitoring Tallulah’s activities as much as she allowed. On March 19, 1919, he wrote to Tallulah’s grandfather that she seemed “to be getting obstreperous again”with Louise. A month later, Louise was in Washington, writing to her father in Jasper to share her conviction that Tallulah was going to hell in a handbasket. She copied out a letter from Mrs. Cauble, in which she described Tallulah as more nervous than any other young person she’d ever known. Louise added her own convictions to Mrs. Cauble’s appraisal: Mrs. Cauble’s letter is only a repetition of the manner in which Tallulah treats all who have undertaken to help her. The history of my efforts,—she tried to discredit by telling all of you it was Ola, my partiality to Ola & etc. which was a great injustice to me and was not true. Florence took her turn and said it was hell and she would never do it again. Sister Marie tried her and tho under most pleasant circumstances she said it was “hell” too—
Not long after The Trap opened to mediocre reviews, Tallulah wrote Will that Goldwyn had invited her to his office and tried to interest her in more film roles. Will urged her to pursue films: “It is a fine thing to contemplate how powerful a factor the screen has become on the thought and conduct of the world, and how great the possibilities it offers to you—my daughter.” But Tallulah’s sights were set firmly and exclusively on the stage.
“I am giving up pictures to go on the legitimate stage as that means so much more to me,” she wrote Will. The Trap was the last movie she made for almost a decade.
Live theater remained not only the more prestigious entertainment medium, but the dominant one in New York City, despite the fact that the silent movie industry was also still largely based in the city. The Broadway theater district stretched from Herald Square to Columbus Circle; by comparison with today, the number of theaters operating and plays produced was staggering.
Louise had informed her father that she had not shared Mrs. Cauble’s letter with her mother because “she worries so about her granddaughters.”
As summer approached; Tallulah began to dread every day’s mail delivery.
She was convinced that her grandmother would recall her summarily as she had years earlier recalled Will from his theatrical adventure in Boston.
Thanks to Jobyna Howland, however, Tallulah was about to speak her first words on Broadway. Howland was appearing with Estelle Winwood in Rachel Crothers’s A Little Journey at the Little Theatre on Forty-fourth Street. Crothers was one of the most important playwrights on Broadway; her play 39 East was running simultaneously across the street at the Plymouth. Howland told Tallulah that she had recommended her to Crothers, who was casting a touring company of 39 East. Howland warned Tallulah not to put on the vampish makeup she customarily applied, for Tallulah would be reading for the role of a sweet young thing living in a Manhattan boardinghouse.
Although at the time Tallulah’s wardrobe was meager, “in those days I felt stark naked unless I had my hat and gloves on.” As she began reading, however, her gloves made it difficult to turn the pages of the onionskin paper script. Paralyzed with nerves, she could not get her gloves off. Crothers interrupted her reading, and Tallulah burst into tears, astoundingly at the very moment the part called for them.
This is the story told by Tallulah in her autobiography. To her family she wrote a different story—without any mention of Jobyna Howland—about how she had buttonholed Crothers’s production associate Mary Kirkpatrick, who was an acquaintance of the Bankheads. Perhaps the Bankheads had made it clear to Tallulah that they disapproved of Howland, after Mrs. Cauble’s dubious allusion to her.
However she procured the job, it was a substantial one. Tallulah was hired to act opposite Sidney Blackmer on weekends during the summer, when leads Constance Binney and Henry Hull would be taking long weekends. In the fall she and Blackmer would begin an eight-month tour of the play across the United States. She wrote Captain John: “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. But it has come in handy in this play. I have to get so mad! Please come and see me.”
Crothers always directed her own plays, and she lavished encouragement and attention on Tallulah during rehearsals. “Crothers was not interested in men,” Andrews said, “and I think she sort of had a crush on Tallulah.” Tallulah reported to her family cheering words from the playwright, who “told me today that I would be a great actress, that I had a spark that few people had, that she never had to tell me anything because I instinctively knew what to do. . . .” But there was “a lot I’ve got to learn about the work that I don’t know and I’m goin
g to work awfully hard.”
Blackmer was just out of the army and at the start of his distinguished career on stage and in film. He, too, hailed from the South. Tallulah and he rehearsed their scenes together while taking rides through Central Park in a horse-drawn carriage. On July 25 they made their debuts. A cast change so fleeting would have been unlikely to be reviewed at all extensively; nevertheless, an unidentified review at the Shubert Archive in New York states that “Tallulah Bankhead gave to her performance as Penelope Penn the idyllic beauty which it demands.” But their run was interrupted after Tallulah’s third weekend onstage, when the cast was directed to strike by the recently formed Actors’ Equity Association. Equity was attempting to limit the largely untrammeled power producers enjoyed over actors. Tallulah plunged into the agitations, handing out programs at benefits that were held regularly to support the unemployed.
Captain John dutifully coughed up a hundred-dollar pledge that Tallulah committed at one of the Equity rallies. But the family did not expect her to become embroiled in public controversy. “Why are you an Equity member?” a Billboard reporter would ask her two years later. She “looked aghast” and was reported to reply, “Why, I really can’t discuss it. . . . I know I ought to be ashamed to admit it, but I don’t know enough about the prin-ciples and the inside to say anything about Equity. All I do know is that I belong to it and I think it is right and that it is the best thing not only for actors, but for managers too.”
While ushering at one rally, Tallulah suddenly felt nauseated and rushed home to the Algonquin. She woke up to find herself being carried on a mattress to an ambulance that sped her to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital.
Her appendix had burst. Peritonitis had already set in. Will’s permission was needed for an operation because she was underage. He motored through the night from Washington, arriving at the hospital at 3:00 A.M.
After six weeks, Tallulah emerged “charged with the conviction that I had all but given my life for a cause.” The strike had ended and the actors had prevailed. Tallulah went to Washington to recover.
The 39 East tour was scheduled to begin in October, but Tallulah experienced sudden trepidation. “I decided that to tour was to court oblivion. Did I leave New York just when I had spoken my first words on its stage, my goose might be cooked. I might spend the rest of my life in Ann Arbors and Springfields and Terre Hautes.” She procured a note from a Washington doctor explaining that she was not yet well enough to travel.
“It was a cheap trick, shockingly unprofessional,” Tallulah admitted, and yet not without some tactical sagacity on the part of the success-obsessed seventeen-year-old. For live theater was so abundant throughout the country at that time that an actress could find herself working regularly very far from Broadway, too far for Tallulah’s comfort. Young actors were sometimes warned not to turn into “Coast Defenders,” not to spend too much time availing themselves of the many opportunities in live theater across the country. The case of Frank Hopkins was cited: Hopkins was a popular actor on the West Coast who made a huge hit on Broadway in 1918 in a play called Lightnin’. But by then he was already seventy years old.
In 1951, Tallulah recalled that during her Algonquin days she was so afraid that she might miss a phone call bringing her next job that she felt uneasy even about accepting invitations to weekend house parties. Nevertheless, having lied about her health, she was now required to absent herself from New York and malinger in Washington. She didn’t return until late in the year. Back in New York she snuck night after night into the Empire Theatre to see Ethel Barrymore impersonate Lady Helen Hatton, a fallen English noblewoman, in Zoë Akins’s Déclassée. Tallulah’s imitation of Barrymore became the flagship of a fleet of imitations that she honed to enhance her desirability as a guest at tony theatrical parties. Tallulah wan-gled as many invitations as she could, assisted by Winwood and her other friends.
Frank Crowinshield was editor of the monthly Vanity Fair and president of the prestigious Coffee House Club on West Forty-fifth Street. He also regularly threw large parties on behalf of his boss, publisher CondéNast. Crowinshield became a great booster of Tallulah’s. Andrews recalled one party where Barrymore and Tallulah were both present. Tallulah was asked to perform her imitations. “She wouldn’t do Ethel because she knew Ethel would raise hell,” and so Tallulah complied by coming up with a tepid imitation of Ethel’s brother Lionel.
Tallulah had crushes on numerous men in New York, and in own her recollection “more than once I trembled on the brink of compliance.” But she was inhibited by the fear that a single wrong move on her part could mean recall by the family. Always implicit in the communications from home was the need for Tallulah to be vigilant against the ever-present danger of moral impropriety. “I love you so dearly,” Mrs. Bankhead wrote Tallulah. “It seems impossible for you ever to disappoint me and shatter my hopes.” Mrs. Bankhead could hardly have imagined that the “vile seducer”so frequently portrayed in the literature of her youth would turn out in Tallulah’s case to be another woman.
In all probability, Tallulah’s love affair with Eva Le Gallienne was her first with a member of either sex. Le Gallienne was three years older than Tallulah, and already well established on her long and distinguished career.
She had already acted with Ethel Barrymore and had had an affair with the great Russian actress Alla Nazimova, also an idol of Tallulah’s. Ann Andrews recounted that Le Gallienne had begun to make overtures to Tallulah, to send her notes at the Algonquin, but Tallulah was leery. Eventually, however, she asked “a youngish man” who frequented the hotel: “What is it the lesbians do?” So he said, “Well, I’ll tell you. Tomorrow go upstairs, take a bath”—at that point Tallulah was sharing a bath, “so under the arms it was rather high at times,” Andrews recalled—“get in bed and I’ll come see you.” Later Tallulah described humorously to Andrews her suitor arriving, taking off his coat and gloves, and proceeding to show her what lesbians did. “Well, I guess it worked, because then she gave in to Le Gallienne.” Tallulah, however, found the Norwegian-British actress rather dour. After Le Gallienne left on a tour, Tallulah complained, “Oh, for God’s sake, she’s been writing me letters every day. Ann, I could never become a lesbian, because they have no sense of humor!”
Tallulah herself alluded to her affair with Le Gallienne to some friends later in life, but many of those who knew her best never disclosed how actively bisexual she was throughout much of her adult life. This may have been due to the taboos of the day or they may actually not have really known, for Tallulah felt the need to compartmentalize her life, and didn’t always wish to see the various compartments overlap. Even after Tallulah’s death, Winwood, for one, adamantly denied to any and all that Tallulah had ever had a relationship with a woman. Over the course of her life, however, Tallulah would find any number of gay women whose sense of humor she found more than acceptable.
Making Her Way
“The part was very unattractive. The girl had nothing to do but talk . . .”
It was a brouhaha not over sex but about Tallulah’s prospects as an actress that seems to have come closest to inciting the family’s recall.
Early in 1920, on the recommendation of producer Al Woods, Sam Harris hired Tallulah for The Hottentot, a new comedy he was producing starring William Collier, one of Broadway’s most popular comedians. Writing her grandfather with the happy news, Tallulah specified that she had signed “an Equity contract” to star opposite Collier. She was floored when, after rehearsing for two days, the stage manager told her she was being dismissed.
Bankhead family spy James Julian got wind of the firing and called Henry Bankhead, Will’s younger brother. Henry had served in the army since 1898 and after returning home from World War I was stationed on Governors Island. Together, Julian and Henry Bankhead confronted Tallulah. “She will not tell me the truth about anything,” Henry wrote Captain John on January 8. “After Julian had told me the facts that she was not in the play she, in his presence
looked me in the eye and said she was rehearsing and she was going to open in it. I can depend on nothing she says.
She seems to resent being asked any questions about her work or prospects.”
Eugenia had come to New York to visit Tallulah. The more the sisters eluded any parental deputy, the more their fun together was undoubtedly enhanced. “I will keep my eye on the girls was much as I can,” Henry wrote his father, “but it is difficult for me to catch them at their hotel.”
But Tallulah was finally forced to admit that she had been dismissed.
“You don’t know how I hated to write you this,” Tallulah wrote Captain John soon after. “I wanted to spare you any anxiety and I thought I would wait until I had started in something else—but you kept wanting to know.”
She told them that Collier, who was then fifty-five, felt that she was too young to play opposite him. This was very likely true, but Tallulah’s severance had also mentioned her voice not being strong enough. That angered her. She had deliberately read casually when she heard the way Collier and the other actors were speaking—this, of course, being what most actors do on the first days of a rehearsal period.
Tallulah assured her family that “it is all for the best because it turned out to be a farce instead of a comedy and there is a lot of difference.” One wonders whether Tallulah at that tender age shared the traditional prejudice against the crudeness of farce—or was she appealing to a prejudice she knew her family would harbor? Tallulah leavened her news with a slighting reassessment of her role. “The part was very unattractive. The girl had nothing to do but talk, not one good scene, emotional or comedy.”
Tallulah! Page 4