Tallulah found solace in work and activity. In June she spent two weeks in Baltimore with a stock company, the George Marshall Players.
She acted in two tried-and-true farces, one from Broadway, Claire Kummer’s Good Gracious, Annabelle, and one from Paris via Broadway, Sasha Guitry’s Sleeping Partners. “Her eyes alone were worth the price of admission,” the Baltimore News wrote about her appearance in the Kummer play.
The good impression she made in the city lingered, for in November, she went down there again to perform with a bevy of major stars at an Actors’Fund benefit.
In July, she began rehearsing for a new play by Martin Brown, a former actor and hoofer who had become a successful playwright. In The Exciters, Tallulah played one of her most interesting roles: Rufus Rand, a reckless daughter of privilege, president of a society of thrill-hungry young women whose identification badge is a gun tucked into the garter belt. The Exciters mixed drawing-room comedy with knockabout crime adventure, a fusion that was found problematic by some critics and perhaps by audiences as well. But it is this blend that makes it interesting reading today. The play opens as Rufus is preparing to go out with her parents, her fellow Exciter Ermintrude, and her cousin Lexington. Rufus is not excited about her im-pending marriage to a dullard she’s known all her life.
After they’re gone, the maid, Vaughan, admits a burglar who calls himself “Five minute Dan McGee.” She has recruited him for a heist of Mrs.
Rand’s pearls. Vaughan is in love with him and doesn’t suspect that he is really a detective. The family returns unexpectedly. Rufus has crashed her car and is in critical condition. Her uncle’s will left Rufus $2 million, to be paid to her on the day she marries a man of whom her father entirely approves. But if Rufus dies single, the money reverts to an unnamed political party. Rufus and her family believe she is fatally injured, and to save the overextended finances of the Rand clan the half-delirious Rufus complies readily when Dan comes out of hiding and offers to marry her, provided he and Vaughan are allowed to escape prosecution.
But Rufus recovers, and before she will go through with the divorce her parents are urging on her, she demands to have the chance to converse consciously with her husband. When he is summoned, she implores him to go straight, and follows him to the headquarters of Vaughan’s gang, a bureau that sells crime ideas to would-be crooks. When Vaughan realizes that Rufus and Dan are mightily attracted to each other, she tries to frame them with her and Dan’s crime bosses. Dan decides to blow his cover and battles his way out, with Rufus’s assistance.
Tallulah’s role gave her a very wide diapason. She was cheeky—“You look like a human rummage sale,” she tells Lexington, when they are both on the mend from the car accident. She was earnest when pleading with Dan to shake his thieving ways, and heroic when trapped with him in the gangsters’ lair. There was a provocative moment when Tallulah as Rufus pulled up her skirt and Dan stealthily plucked the revolver tucked into her garter belt. There was also what must have been a very entertaining exchange when Rufus devolves into street slang to fool the ruffians.
When Rufus learns that Dan is really good, the thrill is suddenly gone; Brown traded on an ancient conceit memorably exploited by Sheridan in The Rivals of 1775. “I’ve never been so disappointed since the day I was born.” She is all for going back to her fiancé, but he has now decided she is too hot to handle. But Dan returns through Rufus’s window in full bandit disguise, tears off his mask, and without having to exercise too much persuasion, is about to exercise his conjugal rights as the curtain falls.
The Exciters opened in Atlantic City on August 20, then moved on to Washington, where one critic remarked that Tallulah, “with deftness and remarkable skill,” had given Rufus “an engaging touch of reality . . . fascinating even though it were a bit Freudian in tone.” The edge of conflict or neurosis would have been altogether appropriate. What made Rufus a provocative heroine was her evident motivation by forbidden stirrings she simply cannot repress.
Tallulah had made impressive strides since arriving in New York five years earlier, devoid of any professional experience. To the theatrical public at large, she was a promising actress who had sparked the interest of some of the leading playwrights and producers on Broadway. To insiders in the theater community, she was also a dashing character whose pranks and didoes provided amused chat for those in the know. She had already assembled around her something of a cult following that encompassed theatrical and nontheatrical constituencies. When The Exciters opened at the Times Square Theatre on September 22, Blythe Daly rushed at the Globe’s S. Jay Kaufman and, “putting her two hands firmly on our necktie, said: ‘If you don’t say she is great I’ll kill you!’ ” Daly was one of many partisans who were in the opening-night audience. Alan Dale wrote in the American: It seemed a pity that Tallulah Bankhead had a lot of silly friends in the theatre who gave her an ovation before she had done a thing, because she really did a great deal. She was charming. She was beautifully dictioned. She had a fine sense of comedy. She had chic, allure, and dominancy. But she had been too much applauded before the play had started. A real case of “Save me from my friends.”
Whatever the composition of the audience, Tallulah was always fearsomely nervous on opening nights. A Tribune reporter—probably Bertie Rascoe, the paper’s “sophomoric Young Intellectual” and a friend of Tallulah’s—went backstage “to see if Miss Bankhead would deliver a few of the bon mots for which she is famed. . . . We have seen many stars after a first night, but never have we seen one who reacted in this strange fashion.”
Whereas onstage Tallulah had been “nonchalant and insolent or brilliant or haughty, but always complete mistress of herself and the situation,” now she was wandering about her dressing room as if she were sleepwalking.
“Was I terrible?” she kept repeating, and then burst into tears.
The Exciters certainly spun a racy, topical story, and Hollywood immediately recognized its possibilities; the next year it reached the screen, starring Bebe Daniels in Tallulah’s role. But it lasted only a month on Broadway. Once again, Tallulah learned the unpredictability of theatrical fortune. “ ‘The Exciters’ closed last night,” the Tribune reported on October 22. “It had been strongly touted as a hit before reaching Broadway, which proves once more that you never can tell. . . .”
Madcaps in London
“I thought I was going to Mars…”
At one of Frank Crowinshield’s parties in the fall of 1922, Estelle Winwood introduced Tallulah to British impresario Charles Cochran.
Every year Cochran visited New York, scouting for properties to import.
Suitably impressed, he considered presenting Tallulah in London as either the waif in Seventh Heaven or the streetwalker waif in Rain, two enormous hits that had recently opened in New York. But he discovered that the rights to both plays were already spoken for. He left New York promising to keep an eye out for a suitable showcase; with him went a photo by Ira Hill, court photographer for the Follies, in which Tallulah gazed through a pictorialist mist.
In December, Tallulah received a telegram; a letter followed soon after.
On Cochran’s recommendation she had been offered the lead in The Dancers, a new play starring Sir Gerald du Maurier, England’s preeminent actor/director. Several weeks later, after Tallulah had made all arrangements and told everyone in her world, another telegram came: du Maurier had changed his plans. An actress named Dorothy Dix had been engaged.
“They were frightened of taking a chance on me,” Tallulah later recalled.
She dared not admit to many in her success-conscious crowd that she’d been rejected sight unseen. But as always, she consulted Winwood. “You never got this telegram,” she instructed Tallulah. She advised Tallulah to report to work as planned. Either she would be reinstated, Winwood reasoned, or another opportunity would present itself.
Even on Winwood’s counsel, Tallulah might not have considered so risky a move had she not recently seen famed astrol
oger Evangeline Adams, J. P. Morgan’s trusted sibyl. Adams advised her that her future lay across the Atlantic: “Go if you have to swim.” But it was the prospect of seeing Napier Alington again—he had not written her once in the months since he’d returned home—that Tallulah admitted was her secret reason for being hell-bent on getting to England.
Tallulah had told her father that all expenses had been guaranteed, as indeed they had been when Cochran’s offer was first made. Gingerly, she approached General T. Coleman du Pont, her grandfather’s former colleague in the Senate, “a wise old man who loved the theater.” She hemmed and hawed until du Pont told her to jot down the amount she wanted. In turn, he would write the amount he thought she should ask. Her bid was $1,000, his $1,500: du Pont chose not to raise her figure.
I’M COMING ANYWAY, Tallulah wired Cochran.
Cochran volleyed back a plea for her not to come, citing that postwar inflation had brought a slump in theater production: IT’S TOO MUCH OF A RISK. I DON’T WANT TO BE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOU TAKING THE CHANCE.
Resistance, as always, only steeled Tallulah’s resolve. She booked passage on the next available ship.
Will came up to New York because she wasn’t of age to get her pass-port. She must have leveled with him somewhat, because in a letter to his sister Marie, he shared his belief that Tallulah’s expenses had been guaranteed, but wrote that she had no more than “a fair chance of being engaged”by du Maurier. “She had gotten somewhat ‘fed up’ in New York,” Will wrote Marie, “and some of the disappointments she had met—and I thought it only fair to give her this extra chance. If her expectations do not materialize, she will at least have had the sight of England, etc.”
General du Pont saw to it that Tallulah left on January 6 in high style.
He hosted a dinner the night of her departure in his suite at the old Waldorf-Astoria. Will was there, and General Pershing, who had commanded the American expeditionary force in World War I. From the Waldorf, at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street, du Pont’s chauffeur drove them west to the Hudson River piers where the S.S. Majestic would set sail at midnight. A delegation of theater friends came to the pier to cheer her off. The New York Herald noted that “Tallulah Bankhead sailed for London yesterday, though her plans concerning just what she will do in London are rather indefinite.”
“I thought I was going to Mars; I was scared to death,” Tallulah recalled in 1963. Crossing the Atlantic, she soothed her qualms by throwing herself around the ballroom floor until, danced into euphoria, she wired Cochran again that she was on her way. She was a few weeks shy of her twenty-first birthday when the Majestic steamed into Southampton. She had reckoned without the vigilance of British immigration officials, and her answers to their reconnaissance efforts bore out her customary belief that disinformation was the best policy. “At first she explained that her father was one of the American House of Representatives and had given her money to come over and see England, that she had no occupation, did not know how long she would stay or where,” the chief immigration office vouchsafed in a report dated January 13, 1923. When he asked her whether she was chaperoned or had any friends either in England or on the ship, she called over an Oxford undergrad she had met on the way over. Tallulah’s cavalier “made a great fuss about Miss Bankhead being interrogated and threatened to report the matter.” Finally she divulged that she was trying to find work with Cochran and would be lodged temporarily at the Ritz. The officer later questioned a steward on the ship who “divulged certain details which confirmed my suspicion that she was not traveling on a liner for the first time and made male friends very quickly.” Tallulah was told to register the next day at London’s central police station.
From Southampton, Tallulah took a train to Paddington Station in London, where Cochran met her and drove her to the Ritz Hotel. The first-class room she took was way beyond her means, but the Ritz’s gilt and pastel lobby, and the luxurious dining room overlooking Green Park, provided an appropriate backdrop for her conquering mission.
There was no time to waste, for The Dancers had already begun rehearsals. Cochran took her to a matinee of Bulldog Drummond, the play du Maurier was just wrapping up. During the intermission Cochran brought her backstage.
“Well, I’m here,” Tallulah told her would-be leading man.
Du Maurier was polite but unrepentant. Cochran, however, “was a showman with a gambling urge,” Tallulah writes in Tallulah. “He looked upon my rejection as a personal defeat.” The intrepid impresario decided another meeting with du Maurier must be arranged. This occurred after an evening performance, giving Tallulah a chance to don the one evening gown she owned and to let down her hair, which had been hidden under a hat the prior day. The tawny tresses of a flapper Rapunzel cascaded down Tallulah’s back; du Maurier was entranced. His daughter, future novelist Daphne, was visiting her father backstage. After a long chat, Tallulah and Cochran sailed out. Teenage Daphne turned to her father and reportedly said, “Daddy, that’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen in my life.”
But Tallulah still had no job. Back at the Ritz the next day, she began a letter to Winwood. “Dear Estelle, I wish to tell you I’m here at the Ritz, and I’ve got sixty dollars left. I don’t know whether to commit suicide . . . Wait a minute. The telephone’s just rung.” It was Viola Tree, coauthor with du Maurier of The Dancers, calling to say that a contract was waiting on du Maurier’s desk.
In 1982, sixty years after the play’s final curtain, eighty-nine-year-old Una Venning sat in a suburban living room cluttered with knickknacks and poured out vivid recollections of The Dancers, in which she had acted with du Maurier, Tallulah, and Audry Carten. Carten played the third lead and would be one of Tallulah’s closest friends all through her London years.
Venning and the cast knew only that actress Dorothy Dix had been rehearsing Tallulah’s part and then one day Dorothy wasn’t there. Work had been canceled that day and the next. The following morning they were summoned back to the theater without a clue about what was happening.
At the head of a short stairway leading from the dressing rooms to the stage appeared Tommy Lovell, du Maurier’s stage manager. With him was a young woman, dressed in a plain navy blue reefer coat. There was a slant to her matching beret, which covered all but a few vagrant locks of gold roguish hair.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Lovell intoned, “this is Miss Tall-u-lah Bankhead.”
“I can’t tell you what a sensation it made,” Venning said with a laugh.
No one had heard of her, but Tallulah’s name—that honeyed tripwire of syllables—was “unbelievable.”
The cast was later told a spurious story that du Maurier, displeased with Dix, had fired off an SOS to Cochran. Cochran had alerted him to a beautiful young American actress allegedly in Paris. Dix, however, “certainly wasn’t bad,” Venning told me. “She wasn’t a tepid actress at all. Tallu was a million times better, but we didn’t know we were going to have anything like that!”
Perhaps du Maurier told Tallulah that Dorothy Dix hadn’t come up to par; probably, however, Tallulah really believed that she had usurped a British actress on her home ground. But that morning she faced what must have seemed like a tribunal—a circle of strangers, some of them distinguished veterans in British theater’s chummy conclave, while she was an outsider, an unknown, and a foreigner.
“Howdy!” Tallulah saluted the cast. Her robust Americanism disarmed them, but not as much as what followed. “On my sacred word of honor,”
the still incredulous Venning recalled, Tallulah asked, “Now, where do I go to spend a penny?”—British slang for “go to the bathroom.” “This was something that was never said in front of men,” Venning insisted. “Today, of course, you’d go in with them! The cast was horrified, let me tell you.”
“Will you meet the cast first?” Lovell asked Tallulah while a few nervous titters escaped from the actors.
“Yes, please,” she said, and went around shaking hands.
Dorothy Dickson, Tallulah’s friend from the Algonquin, was in London, too, starring in the British production of Ziegfeld’s Sally. Tallulah contacted Dickson immediately after learning that The Dancers was finally hers. Dickson invited her to breakfast at her home on Chesterfield Street in Mayfair, London’s ancient aristocratic stronghold.
“She was really beginning life again,” Dickson said. Tallulah had several letters of introduction to important people in the British theater firmament, but she knew no one in the city apart from Dickson, with whom she shared her considerable anxiety. Yet as they talked, Dickson thought how well Tallulah looked. The misbegotten Mary Pickford curls were gone. Tallulah had returned to her natural wave. Gone, too, was the vampish makeup she’d affected at the Algonquin. Now and for the rest of her life, Tallulah trusted her bone structure and offstage usually wore very little makeup besides lipstick. “She had found her type, her look,” recalled Dickson.
“It is the ambition of every young actress to be with Sir Gerald,”
Cochran had written Tallulah in New York. At fifty, du Maurier was virtually the leader of the British theater profession. He was the forerunner of a long succession of English “actor/managers” who, perpetuating a tradition dating back at least to the commedia dell’arte troupes of the 1500s, dominated British theater throughout the Victorian era and well into the 1920s. Actor/managers built, bought, or rented their own theaters. They produced and directed the plays in which they starred and stamped their ensembles with their own acting style. Du Maurier had commandeered Wyndham’s Theatre in 1910 and had kept it humming since that time, aided by coproducer Frank Curzon and business manager Tommy Vaughan.
“Women adored him,” Venning recalled, “and rushed madly to see him” despite, or because, du Maurier was far from the conventional leading man. His face was strange and gaunt, sloping down from large blue eyes to a blunt nose, knobby chin, lips one might call stealthy. “A fascinating face,” recalled Venning, “albeit no pretensions to good looks. And a lithe, lovely body.”
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