Tallulah!

by Joel Lobenthal

  During the first two weeks of January 1921, Nice People tried out in Springfield, Massachusetts, and in Baltimore. Then Crothers began to re-cast it, replacing the interpreters of Teddy’s father, her aunt, and her fellow playgirl Eileen, who was now portrayed by the up-and-coming Katharine Cornell. The new cast tried out the play again in Providence in mid-February.

  On February 12, Tallulah wrote her grandmother that she and Winwood were thinking of renting a furnished apartment on Forty-eighth Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues. One week later, Tallulah’s Aunt Louise dropped dead while shopping on a vacation in Miami. The previous five years had been filled with sorrow and disappointment for Louise, some of it generated by Tallulah. A great deal of enmity had developed over the past three years between her and Louise. Writing Mrs. Bankhead on February 28, Tallulah was intent on reassuring her bereaved grandmother about the state of her own health. “I feel awfully well and strong and am keeping good hours, and no cigarettes so don’t worry your sweet self about my health. But take care of your own Mamma Darling. . . .”

  Nice People’s New York opening was postponed twice because the new Klaw Theatre on Forty-fifth Street remained unfinished. Last-minute preparations precluded (or became a convenient excuse to postpone) a planned visit to Washington. “I have been busy every minute with rehearsals and fitting of clothes for the opening,” she wrote her grandmother,“so won’t be able to come down this weekend but the very first chance I get I will.”

  Crothers’s work suffered the strain of her concern with women’s issues of the day and her equally strong determination to adhere to formulas that determined commercial success. The more highbrow critics were particularly offended that Crothers’s Teddy could possibly be outraged that no one in her jaded set believed that she hadn’t slept with Billy. Teddy’s combination of naïveté and precocity “might have daunted Shakespeare,” O. W.

  Firkins wrote in the Weekly Review, but “it has no terrors for Miss Crothers.”

  Writing in the Bookman, S.G.H. declared that “It is a pleasant and mythical world in which Miss Crothers lives and pays her income tax, and she serves a happy public which prefers anything to an artistic truth and finds satisfaction in her service. Standing room only almost any night, of course . . .” The reviewer knew whereof he spoke: Nice People immediately took off after opening on March 2 and ran through the fall, after which Larrimore began touring it extensively. It continued to be a favorite of regional theaters throughout the 1920s.

  As always, Crothers had cast her play meticulously. “All the assisting parts are well played,” wrote Theatre magazine. “Tallulah Bankhead deserves much praise for her Hallie Livingston.” Vanity Fair described her as“too pretty to be suspected of the claws she uses so effectively . . . the despair of her elders and the delight of the audience as the catty little Hallie.”

  Tallulah was emboldened by the attention she received. Zit’s Weekly Newspaper ran a short profile in which it quoted her as saying, “And while blondes are supposed to be fickle and changeable, here is one,” speaking of herself, “who knows her own mind—at least she knows what she wants in the way of a career, and who won’t be satisfied until she gets it.”

  Hallie Livingston was not Tallulah Bankhead, though Tallulah surely took cues from her as she developed her personal style. “I prefer a character part to any other role, if the character is just true to life,” Tallulah told a reporter. “I want emotional roles. The eternal ingenue means nothing in my life. Many actresses never like to give the public the impression that they are anything but sweet young things and they won’t accept a role that doesn’t show them to advantage. I don’t mind playing the role of a cat if I can just convince the public for the duration of the play that I am a cat.” In her mind, the boundaries were as yet distinct. “I want always to play my role, not play Me,” Tallulah explained. “When people meet me offstage and seem surprised that I don’t say sarcastic things to everyone every other sentence, I always feel flattered and happy, for I feel that I am really successful in creating a character.”

  But Tallulah was intent on becoming notorious; she had started in motion the construction of a persona that she could hardly have realized would swiftly imprison her. Rather than hide her sexual iconoclasm, she began incorporating it into her social pleasantries. “Hello, my name is Tallulah Bankhead,” she told a guest at writer Heywood Hale Broun’s apartment. “I’m a lesbian. What do you do?” In part because of her own palaver, Broadway Brevities, a slick-papered monthly that chronicled New York’s amusements, was able with impunity now to make repeated references to Tallulah’s alleged lesbian romances. Tallulah, Winwood, Le Gallienne, and Blythe Daly—a young actress who was the very social daughter of theater star Arnold Daly—were termed the “Four Horsewomen of the Algonquin,”a gloss on Rudolph Valentino’s film The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

  Winwood, however, was neither gay nor bisexual. She lived to age 101and indulged in many things but rarely to the point of excess. And she was certainly discreet; Tallulah’s lack of circumspection alarmed her from the first. “Dear girl,” Winwood warned her, “you go too far, you go too far.”

  During Nice People’s run, Crothers made Tallulah Larrimore’s understudy for the lead role. After Larrimore came down with a bad case of flu, Tallulah spent several weeks rehearsing Larrimore’s part by day but not knowing which part she was going to play at night. Larrimore’s condition was erratic and Tallulah couldn’t be sure until she arrived for the performance. “I have been a nervous wreck,” she wrote her grandmother.

  During the summer, Tallulah shared a brownstone apartment next to Carnegie Hall with Beth Martin, an aspiring actress who was the daughter of opera singer Ricardo Martin. Her parents were divorced and she lived with her mother at the time, but her mother was traveling in Europe.

  Before giving her permission to come to New York, Will had made Tallulah promise to abstain completely from alcohol, which she says in her autobiography was motivated by fear that his own problems with alcohol“might be hereditary.” However, when Beth Martin brought home some port one evening for them to try, both she and Tallulah got violently drunk.

  They suffered hangovers the next day, and after that, Tallulah was more resolute than ever about staying away from liquor. But true to her determination to feign worldliness, at parties she instead asked for cocaine, at that point a particularly fashionable drug. Eventually her bluff was called, and she was given some, and thus forced to fumble her way through a self-initiation in sniffing the drug. At another penthouse party, she again asked for cocaine but was given heroin, which made her throw up in the cab on the way home to Beth Martin’s apartment. She was forced to miss two performances of Nice People. Tallulah told the management that she had come down with food poisoning.

  Such is Tallulah’s account of what she describes as the sum total of her drug use in New York, but Winwood later said to Denis Brian, author of 1972’s Tallulah, Darling, “Don’t believe a word Tallulah says about it. . . .

  She was taking cocaine like mad at one time.” Cocaine supplies a feeling of invincibility that would have allayed the considerable anxieties that lay underneath Tallulah’s seemingly assured, decidedly aggressive, and sometimes extraordinarily risky social behavior. She continued to use cocaine all her adult life.

  It was through Beth Martin that Tallulah met the Honorable Napier Alington—called “Naps” by his friends—the man she frequently described in later years as the love of her life. Martin was acquainted with Jeffrey Homsdale, later the Earl of Amherst, who was writing a theatrical column for the Morning World. Homsdale had come to New York with his lover Noël Coward, who was several years away from his breakthrough success with the play The Vortex and was having miserable luck trying to peddle his scripts to New York producers.

  One night Homsdale phoned Alington from Beth Martin’s apartment and invited him over. Ever on the prowl, Alington raced uptown in a cab, a bottle of gin in the pocket of the coat he’d thrown over h
is pajamas. Alington tried to get Tallulah into bed and she declined reluctantly. Within a week, she claimed, he had asked her to marry him, a proposal she regarded as nothing more than a gambit by a practiced seducer. Tallulah had resolved that marriage would wait until she had made her mark in the theater. But nevertheless she was infatuated. She had a decided fondness for British men; Tallulah recalled decades later that before going to England she’d known “quite a few of the boys at the British Embassy” in New York.

  Twenty-five years old, Alington was the son of Feodorowna Yorke, daughter of the sixth Earl of Hardwicke, and of Sir Humphrey Napier Sturt Alington. The Alingtons’ London home at 38 Portland Square was “the hub of the big wheel of Edwardian fashion,” according to Sonia Keppel’s memoir, Edwardian Daughter. Alington’s father was friends with King Edward and shared the favors of the monarch’s mistress, Mrs. Gertrude Keppel, who was Sonia’s mother. The Alingtons also spent time in the country at Crichel, their enormous estate in Dorset, where Lady Alington kept a private dairy. Lord Alington also owned substantial tracts of East End London slums, where once a year he was burned in effigy by his tenants.

  The Alingtons had lost a boy and girl in infancy; Napier’s brother Gerald Philip Montague had died in 1918 at age twenty-five of wounds suffered during World War I. Alington could have served but did not, because he was tubercular. He had been sent to New York by his family to study banking, but preferred to devote his energies to extracting as much pleasure as he could out of the city’s high and low life. He had stayed first with Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt on Fifth Avenue, but soon found a Greenwich Village apartment more compatible.

  Alington was tall, the way Tallulah inevitably preferred her men, and had a face that suggested androgynous fragility and a faunlike sensuality.

  He was intelligent, witty, aesthetically informed. His voice always seemed to be harboring a chuckle; his charm was legendary.

  Tallulah’s affair with Alington coincided with her first starring role on Broadway. Rachel Crothers had allowed Katharine Cornell to leave Nice People so that she could play the lead in A Bill of Divorcement, with which she began four decades of Broadway stardom. The playwright likewise allowed Tallulah to leave before the run had ended because she, too, had another job; in this case, a new play entitled Everyday that Crothers had written especially for her. Tallulah took a week’s rest before starting to work on the role of Phyllis Nolan, another Crothers heroine who turns her back on the crass and the superficial. Asked by a reporter whether she missed having her own children, Crothers replied, “I feel that they are all my daughters, all these girls. I am a universal mother. I love them all and love to study them. I think that the younger generation is the greatest marvel of the world.”

  Crothers joined a chorus of homegrown voices skewering American corruption, American provincialism. Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street had appeared one year earlier, and reviewing Everyday, the Baltimore News opined that the theme of “the eternal Main Street . . . seems in a fair way to displace the eternal triangle in our dramatic literature.” In Everyday, Phyllis Nolan returns from a yearlong tour of Europe to find herself disenchanted with her small hometown in the Midwest. Her father, a judge, has selected a husband for her. The prospective husband, however, is indicted for prof-iteering and conspiracy, while Phyllis runs off with John McFarlane, her father’s private secretary, an aspiring artist whose background is humble.

  The Baltimore critic did not believe that Phyllis Nolan’s future happiness was at all assured, however. “For the thing which our Main Street writers really object to is not merely the stupidity of a small town but the stupidity of life itself, which is much harder to get away from.”

  Again, Crothers’s casting was blue chip: Henry Hull was McFarlane, while so distinguished an actress as Lucille Watson was on hand to play the supporting role of a friend of the Nolan family whose dance-mad, stock-market-speculating children epitomize postwar materialism.

  After trying out in Atlantic City, Baltimore, and Washington, Everyday opened at the Bijou Theatre on November 16, 1921. In the American, Alan Dale wrote that “Miss Crothers is usually freighted with a message to humanity,” and in Everyday she had gone “hot and heavy after ideals.” Opinion was divided about whether she had been able to incorporate her message into a coherent dramatic resolution. But the critics liked Tallulah: the Christian Science Monitor noted that “Miss Bankhead’s ability to appear like a being from a plane loftier than the littleness of the Nolans made her an ideal choice for the Phyllis role.”

  “Miss Bankhead looks ravishing,” Variety’s “Lait.” attested, “and has a dramatic quiver in her larynx that should be worth a fortune in a reasonable play.” Indeed Tallulah would parlay her particular throb with great effectiveness over the course of her career, but like everything else about Tallulah’s acting, it was controversial. Senior critic John Ranken Towse of the Morning Post didn’t think she was wielding it effectively: he described her as giving “an altogether sincere and sympathetic portrayal of the part, though at times a vocal catch marred her diction.”

  Tallulah and Alington were spending a great deal of time together: they danced into the early morning at Reisenweber’s, a palatial nightclub on Columbus Circle, and brunched at the Brevoort Hotel on lower Fifth Avenue. Tallulah was so smitten that once again her professionalism was compromised. Alington was not political, but was in many ways a conventional product of his class; he “had great respect and affection for the Royal Family,” Tallulah notes. The script of Everyday required Tallulah’s Phyllis Nolan to answer a question about her tour of Europe by saying, “Oh, well, kings and queens are really kind of a joke. The most interesting person I met was a prostitute.” Tallulah was afraid that Alington might be offended should he be in the audience. She kept leaving out the line until her job was in jeopardy. But Everyday closed before matters could come to a head, after a run of only thirty performances. One can only wonder whether Tallulah would actually have relinquished a job rather than risk a possible slight to him.

  Tallulah’s first shot at stardom might have taught her a bitter truth about the theater. While there was nothing obscure or experimental about Everyday, it was a more substantial play than Nice People, treating with greater honesty conflicts of parent and child, old and new, provincialism and sophistication, material and spiritual. But Nice People flourished while Everyday closed after three weeks. Perhaps the ambivalent ending was off-putting to audiences, but there may simply have been no logical explanation for the play’s premature demise. As much as failure, success in the entertainment world is often arbitrary, and over the course of her career Tallulah would give some of her best performances in plays that failed.

  Her disappointment over the play was compounded by the fact that not long after Everyday closed, Alington went back to England, leaving Tallulah “devastated,” she writes in Tallulah. “Memories of our hours together haunted me.” She joined the cast of the play Danger, written by Cosmo Hamilton, which had opened in December. Tallulah succeeded Marie Goff in the role of an ambitious British woman who marries a brilliant lawyer.

  She tells him on their honeymoon night that she has no time for sex but is interested only in fostering his career and basking in reflected glory. She reconsiders only when he takes up with his secretary, who offers herself “as a substitute outlet for his pent-up emotions,” as one critic declared, and proceeds to lives in sin.

  In Danger, Ruth Hammond had a comic role as a Cockney maid. Hammond had already seen one of Tallulah’s silents. “There’s someone!” she thought to herself when Tallulah appeared on the screen. H. B. Warner, a leading man in silent films, was returning to the stage after two years’ absence, and he directed Danger as well. Tallulah would “listen if he had anything to tell her,” Hammond recalled in 1991, “but she knew as much about acting as he did, knew about that character, anyway.” Yet although Tallulah played the part “awfully well,” Hammond felt that she was miscast: she was too young, and “I couldn’t envision
her being the frigid wife in real life; I couldn’t imagine that at all!”

  Tallulah went into the part on January 23, 1922, and played it for the remaining four weeks of its run. In April, she began rehearsing for a starring role in a new comedy, Her Temporary Husband. As the play was due to begin tryouts in Connecticut on May 9, Mrs. Bankhead was failing rapidly. On Saturday, May 6, Tallulah cabled her grandmother that she would soon be coming down for the weekend, but according to a newspaper report, she went to visit her in Washington the very next day, before traveling to Stam-ford. Mrs. Bankhead died four days later at the age of seventy-eight. Tallulah had apparently neglected to let her family know her itinerary before she left Washington, and so the Bankheads were forced to contact Estelle Winwood in New York and ask for Tallulah’s address on tour so that they could notify her. Mrs. Bankhead’s remains were taken to Jasper for burial next to her husband.

  Tallulah’s love for her grandparents informed her lifelong solicitude for and sensitivity to the feelings of the elderly. She would flout much of what her grandmother had taught her, but Mrs. Bankhead’s Southern belief in decorum would remain a lasting standard for Tallulah—one that she would criticize herself for not upholding.

  Tallulah’s run with Her Temporary Husband was brief, and the cause for this brevity mysterious. The play was originally scheduled to open on Broadway on May 22, but didn’t arrive until August. Many Manhattan theaters closed during the summer, and it was not uncommon for plays to open on the road in June, then heed their reviews and close for the summer to repair and revise before a fall opening on Broadway. When Her Temporary Husband opened on Broadway it was not Tallulah but instead her friend Ann Andrews who played the lead. Tallulah may have reconsidered her involvement in the play, or the producers may have reconsidered her.