On January 20, Will arrived in New York to attend to business on behalf of the U.S. Shipping Board, and to do his own reconnaissance on Tallulah. He wrote Florence that Tallulah had reserved a room for him at the Algonquin, but the next morning his brother Henry visited him at the hotel and invited him to stay with him “not only to be with him but to save some expense.” Will consulted with a Mr. Rhinack, who promised to introduce Tallulah to producer Lee Shubert, and another man, in charge of casting for prominent producer John Golden, who told him that Tallulah was indeed being considered for two roles. These assurances were sufficient for Will to allow Tallulah to remain in New York, and soon she was writing her grandfather again: “I know you were very much disappointed about the play and you did not scold or show your disappointment. Thank you for your kindness. . . .”
“If you can’t get what you want take what you can get,” Will wrote her.
“Idleness around the hotel is not to be desired.” It was undoubtedly to pla-cate her family that Tallulah returned to West Somerville to play a supporting role in a play called The Five Million, during the week of February 12. Soon after she returned to New York, Aunt Marie came north to visit her. “Tallulah needs new clothes,” Will wrote from Washington. “You go shopping with her. Buy comfortable and durable things. . . . I am delighted that you are with her.”
In January, Tallulah had been to see the legendary producer/director David Belasco, and she held out to her family the possibility that an engagement with him might be in the offing. After passing through New York on her way to a vacation in the Midwest, Mrs. Bankhead gently warned Tallulah to expect more intrusions. “If I had not left N.Y. so shortly after you ditched me at the Biltmore, I should have been to see thee. As it was I left to visit out here and did not even have a chance to ring you. In about two weeks I shall be back in N.Y. . . . and shall pounce on you . . . ’cause I am anxious to talk with thee. Your Belasco news is stunning. I think you have at last found the genius to bring out all your best powers. Congratulations!!”
The family was relieved when Tallulah moved out of the Algonquin and in with Henry and his family on Governors Island. But their stresses continued: Captain John had been confined to his bed for a month with the grippe. “I think your heart and your purse both need a rest, Honey,”
Tallulah wrote him. “I’m afraid I have taxed them both too much.” He was expected to recover until he suddenly worsened and died on March 1, 1920, aged seventy-eight.
A portrait of Tallulah hung opposite his bed and he had enjoyed contemplating it during his last days. He had encouraged her theatrical ambitions and she may have been, as Tallulah claimed, his favorite grandchild.
But that did not prevent him from seeing her with clarity. Three months before he died, he had described Tallulah to a friend as “a peculiar child . . .self-reliant to a fault, perhaps, and always thinks her plans are best.”
After Captain John’s death, Tallulah wrote her bereaved grandmother that “when I have done something very big and worth while on the stage I will send for you and we will have a dear little apartment and live together and you can come and see me play. Won’t it be nice. . . .”
By April, Tallulah was drawing a salary once more, creating her first speaking role on Broadway. George Tyler, one of the most important producers of the day, had commissioned Zoë Akins to construct Footloose, a contemporary revision of Forget Me Not, a great melodrama staple of the 1880s and ’90s. Before the war, Akins had been a reporter for the magazine McClure’s, where she became a friend and protégée of Willa Cather, who was then editor. She also wrote modernistic poetry and poetry criticism.
With the war, however, she had become a commercial playwright who consistently devised strong women’s roles. Akins and Tallulah’s mentor Jobyna Howland were reputedly lovers. Both Howland and Sidney Blackmer, Tallulah’s costar in 39 East, had talked up Tallulah to Akins, who had also seen and been impressed by Tallulah’s mimicry at parties of Barrymore’s performance in Akins’s own Déclassée. Fifteen years later, Akins, in her screenplay for the film Morning Glory, would use the teenage Tallulah as a model for the character of eccentric aspiring actress Eva Lovelace, played on screen by Katharine Hepburn. Akins knew how to write showy parts for stars, and on Broadway the star system dominated all. Today, when we no longer have any such thing as a star actor who performs primarily onstage, it is intriguing to review the annals of great theatrical stars who are now entirely forgotten. One of the more intriguing is Emily Stevens, who was to play the lead in Footloose. She was the niece of another great star, Mrs. Fiske. Stevens had scored a tremendous hit in 1911’s The Unchastened Woman, as a society vampire who tries to woo a young architect away from his slum-reform ideals and his young wife. In Footloose she was again playing a predatory adventuress, who descends upon the home of her dead son’s wife and her family. Tallulah was her young daughter-in-law, tear-ridden throughout all three acts of the melodrama. It was a perfect specimen of the “well-made play” that dominated late-nineteenth century theater, in which human life was aggressively manipulated into a regulated grid of revelations, misunderstandings, confrontations.
Tallulah was sick to her stomach on the first day of rehearsals. To her surprise, Stevens told her that she, too, was physically ill not only at rehearsals and opening nights but before every single performance. This depressed Tallulah further. (Stevens, who committed suicide eight years later, at age forty-five, may not have given Tallulah the most balanced representation of theater temperament.) Valuable tips could also be absorbed from noted British actor O. P. Heggie, who directed Footloose in addition to costarring as the villain.
On May 7, Tallulah wrote her grandmother thanking her for “your sweet letter and the ‘love gifts.’ ” Mrs. Bankhead was going to spend some time in Jasper. “I am glad for your sake that you are going south,” Tallulah wrote. “I think the change will be very good for you and you will be happier. . . . Tomorrow is ‘Mothers Day!’ your own day, mamma Darling. . . .
You are my mother and I love you with all my heart.”
“We have been rehearsing night and day,” Tallulah informed her. “We open Monday night at the Greenwich Village Theater New York City. I am awfully nervous about it. Say a big prayer for me.”
Audiences of 1920 expected a less evident footprint of the author’s machinations than Footloose supplied. Tallulah claimed that the script had been rushed into production prematurely. Akins had a great deal on her plate at the moment, and had not even finished the second act when they started rehearsals. On May 11, the Telegram stated that, “Not even Miss Akins can make ‘Footloose’ contemporaneous with the present generation, which has known Ibsen and Strindberg and the later Pinero. . . .” But Kenneth MacGowan in the Globe cast a jaundiced eye on the relative merits of one era as judged by its successor. “It is still a barren trick play, and the trick happens to be the old and hence obvious, where those of our present crops of trick plays like ‘The Sign on the Door’ [a yarn of murder and adultery] are still new.”
Tallulah’s work was praised. The New York Times noted that “If there was an individual success scored . . . it went to Tallulah Bankhead. . . .
Miss Bankhead plays with considerable power, and sustains a difficult role with real skill.”
Will was thrilled at her notices and relieved that she was making some money: “My expenses have been awfully heavy,” he wrote on May 20, “and I am strained most always, so you must help me by not wasting any of your own money, now that you are making something.”
On the same day, Tallulah wrote her grandmother assuring her by implication that she was avoiding midnight suppers at the Algonquin: “When I come all the way back from the Greenwich Village Theatre which is way downtown I am so tired I flop into bed.” The Greenwich Village was considered a Broadway house although it stood at the corner of Seventh Avenue South and West Fourth Street. Tallulah’s ride downtown on the Sixth Avenue elevated subway gave her a glimpse into tenements bordering the
“El.” S
he found it a sobering glimpse at an urban poverty more squalid than her own often pinched existence. But Tallulah remained hungry often enough. In fact, Tyler complained to Akins that the stage manager was up in arms because Tallulah was furtively gobbling food onstage that was reserved for Stevens’s character to nibble on.
Tallulah described observing Stevens onstage and off as “an education beyond that I could have gained in a drama school.” Many accounts of Tallulah’s life and career written since her death chastise her for not attending drama school, and even seem to offer this as an explanation for the later vicissitudes of her career. But Tallulah’s decision to forgo formal training was hardly unusual in that day and age. In those days, as Steve Vineberg reports in his study of “Method” acting, “the teaching of acting was still in its infancy, and still a highly individualized process.” When Tallulah said in a 1921 interview that she felt that the stage itself was the best place to acquire technique and experience, she was voicing a belief that was common—while not unanimous—in her day.
Tallulah was in such a hurry to prove herself to her family that acting school may have seemed a gratuitous delay. She could also have been leery of anything that reminded her of her dismal experiences with formal education. But the same vagaries that had plagued her in school afflicted her from her first days on Broadway. Andrews recalled a friend telling her about performing a scene with Tallulah, who had gone on automatic pilot.
She was supposed to describe another character’s white teeth and curly hair, but instead said that he had white hair and curly teeth. No one in the audience laughed. Tallulah delivered the line with absolute conviction, born of what her colleague thought was an equally total obliviousness of the words she was speaking.
An even more disruptive incident occurred not long after Footloose opened. Incredibly, she walked out of a matinee during an intermission, thinking that the performance was over. Her understudy finished the performance. Akins issued a dry reprimand: “I hear sometimes that the theatre is bad for a pure young girl; but not half so bad as a pure young girl is for the theatre.” Tallulah was chastened by the experience, but recounting the story in her 1952 autobiography, she admitted it was not the last time she had been disoriented by the disciplined repetition of a theatrical run.
“I’ve done that since, removed my make-up and started to leave the theater halfway through a play. Usually this happens after months in the same role, when I’ve lost all sense of time, of the words I’m speaking, of the act I’m in.”
Footloose found an audience, and Tallulah remained with the cast until September, by which time the play had moved uptown to the Little Theatre on West Forty-fourth Street. But she continued to arouse her family’s anxiety. “I have waited and waited to hear from you for weeks,” Will wrote on June 29, “but not a line from you.” Instead he had received a telegram from Henry stating that she needed two hundred dollars to pay her months-old Algonquin arrears. “I don’t wish to seem harsh,” Will reproached Tallulah, “but there is absolutely no excuse on earth for you treating me with the indifference and neglect you have, and I am deeply hurt and want you to know it. . . . You know that I am always willing to assist you to the very limit of my ability, but what I resent is that you do not take me into your confidence, and really treat me like I was an outsider.”
He was upset that she had been forced to take a pay cut—which may have been impressed on the cast to keep the play running through the summer doldrums that set in before theaters were air-conditioned. He had come to see the Algonquin as a fetid den of indolence. “You have been stuffed up in that Algonquin until a change is absolutely essential.”
They were pleased when Tallulah sent word that she had moved into an apartment at 685 Madison Avenue with a young woman whose last name was Smith. The Bankheads liked Miss Smith, whom they met when she passed through Washington, Will describing her in a letter to Tallulah he wrote on August 13 as a “very attractive, common sense young woman”
who had written Mrs. Bankhead a note which pleased her very much. Will advised Tallulah to do the same, since “you are always first in her mind and she wants frequent word from you.” He included an admonition she would have done well to heed: “I hope you are not smoking too many cigarettes as they are mighty bad for you, your nerves and looks too. . . .”
Henry had told Will that Tallulah looked pale; Will wanted her to stay with Henry’s wife in the upstate New York mountains once Footloose closed: “If you haven’t enough money let me know and I will scrape some up for you.” Or she could come stay with them; as he did most summers, he rented a house in the Washington, D.C., environs. “We would be mighty happy to have my baby girl here, where you could do as you pleased—eat and sleep and read and be nursed.”
But Footloose continued to run and Tallulah was also enjoying the presence of her sister in New York. During her coming out season in Washington, Eugenia had met Morton Hoyt, the dissipated scion of a prominent family. They eloped that very same day. Their families demanded that the marriage be annulled, but later in 1920 they were remarried in a lavish wedding in Bar Harbor, Maine. Tallulah could not attend because of Footloose, but the Hoyts moved to Manhattan and were living on Central Park South. Tallulah wrote her grandmother on October 19:
Sister and Morton are so happy. I see them every day and sister is a very neat and tidy little house wife. She won’t let me leave a thing on the floor. You should feel very pleased Mamma dear because it is all from your good influence and training and although we were stubborn kiddies and didn’t like picking up our nighties your little scoldings did not go for nothing for we are all profiting by them now and are very thankful to our only little Mamma.
Footloose still had a month to run when Tallulah left in September.
Stevens was planning a tour that would begin in November, and perhaps Tallulah still did not want to tour. The management would have wanted her replacement to receive the imprimatur of at least a few weeks on Broadway. Perhaps she had already heard that she had a chance for a role in a much more distinguished property: George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House, about to be presented by the Theatre Guild. The Guild was then the most prominent rebuke Broadway offered to the profit-driven product that dominated its stages. On a nonprofit basis before a subscription audience, the Guild presented a roster of adventurous new plays, many imported from the art theaters of Europe. It was no less unscrupulous, however, than its more profit-minded brethren. The Guild had an unpleasant habit of letting performers rehearse roles that were already committed to actors not yet available to start work.
Tallulah recounts that she was led to believe she had an excellent shot at the part of Effie Dunn—the meaty role of a young woman by turns idealistic, pragmatic, and disillusioned—in Shaw’s slapstick tragedy of civilization at the breaking point. She lit candles at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and recited the Stations of the Cross. But after rehearsing for two days she was dismissed. She learned that she had been only a stopgap until Elizabeth Risdon could begin work. Risdon was a Guild regular who had also played Tallulah’s sister in Footloose. Tallulah’s sense of betrayal was so stinging that for years she vowed she would never again work for the Guild, a vow she kept until 1945.
“I’m a Lesbian. What Do You Do?”
“And while blondes are supposed to be fickle and changeable, here is one who knows her own mind—at least knows what she wants in the way of a career, and won’t be satisfied until she gets it.”
Mrs. Bankhead dressed nattily and loved the finest things. In her dressing room closet were arrayed rows of exquisite shoes that she accessorized with matching silk stockings. Tallulah had inherited her grandmother’s tiny feet—a mark of caste for women in the South—and particularly since her grandmother was now wearing mourning could not help asking: “If you have any shoes or stockings that you don’t need and it is not too much trouble I wish you would send them to me as I am rather destitute again.”
Tallulah’s association with Miss Smith seemed to
have ended. She was living alternately at the Algonquin or sharing Estelle Winwood’s digs at the Great Northern Hotel on West Fifty-seventh Street. “I have missed you so much my dear little mamma,” Tallulah wrote, “and I love you better than any one in the world.” As always in her letters to Mrs. Bankhead, it is all but impossible to separate Tallulah’s genuine emotion from the overkill she deemed necessary to preempt interference by her family. Mrs.Bankhead’s health had begun to fail. “My dear little Mamma is much too charming and wonderful to ever be the least bit ill,” Tallulah assured her.
In Tallulah’s next play, Rachel Crothers’s Nice People, she was able to display for the first time her flair for the caustic repartee of high comedy.
Tallulah was Hallie Livingston, a young Manhattan playgirl, false friend of the heroine, Theodora Gloucester, who was played by Francine Larrimore, another of Crothers’s favorite interpreters. “Teddy” defies her father and takes a late night joyride to the country with her boyfriend, Scotty, where they are stranded by a storm in her country house, but conveniently chaperoned by Billy Wade, a young farmer who happens to be passing by. Billy’s values put to shame the butterflies with whom Teddy has been carousing and she elects to give up her spoiled, selfish city ways and remain with Billy in Arcadia.
Hallie Livingston reveals her treachery in a host of pungent lines. In act 1, she tells Teddy that her pearls are “marvelous—simply marvelous.
No wonder Scotty wants you.” In act 2, Teddy’s gang troops out to the country to try to persuade her to marry Scotty and thereby save her good name. Hallie drips with venomous sympathy when Teddy remains adamant.
“No matter how ghastly people are to you or how many drop you and cut you completely you just musn’t mind. You must be brave.” Hallie knows that Teddy and Scotty aren’t in love with each other. She knows just what Scotty is made of and what it would take to hook him. “All you need is money to make you perfect,” she tells him, vanishing in a cloud of insouciant bravado with the promise to “see you very soon, old man!”
Tallulah! Page 5