Tallulah!

by Joel Lobenthal

  Du Maurier was the son of one of the fin de siècle’s great celebrities, novelist and cartoonist George du Maurier. But it had taken du Maurier ten years onstage to become a star, when in 1906 he took on the role of Raffles in the play of the same name written by E. W. Hornung and Eugene Presby.

  Raffles had been the hero of a series of enormously popular detective yarns written by Hornung. He was a social pillar who also happened to be a safe-cracker. Since that time, du Maurier continued to draw London in tailor-made plays that touched on subversive glints underneath an impeccable facade. Du Maurier left a handful of films made in the last few years before his death in 1934; although by then somewhat battered, his charm and authority are inimitable.

  The Dancers was a sophisticated melodrama revisiting the “social” and“problem” plays that Ibsen and Shaw had introduced at the turn of the century. Rather than trust-busting or venereal disease or women’s rights, The Dancers concerned the furor over dancing, more particularly, women’s dancing, and their losing control and being uncontrollable—a controversy that could be traced back to ancient Greece and the maenads. Just before World War I it flared up again, with the advent of ragtime and the inauguration of afternoon tea dances, where young matrons often went to shop for gigolos moonlighting as dancing partners. The hue and cry had been tamped down in New York by the eminently married couple Irene and Vernon Castle, the leading ballroom dance team of the era. They preached the respectability of the new dance; they lived it. They extolled the new steps as good for the health. To prove it they opened Castle House in Manhattan, a strictly chaperoned dance salon for the children of high society.

  Now, after the war, the blare and din of jazz and its dances were under fire. Oddly enough, these were less suggestive than the turkey trot and bunny hug of the war years. Partners were no longer clinched together in closed holds, but these new dances were just as controversial in their frenzied gyrations and the spell they cast over the war-ravaged upper crust. In 1991, Frances Donaldson recalled those days, when her father, Frederick Lonsdale, had been one of London’s foremost comic playwrights. London’s beau monde “shuffled around the floors from teatime until dawn,”

  Donaldson writes, “returning to their homes as the water carts cleaned the streets.”

  The Dancers offered arguments pro and con. Flanking du Maurier were two different dancers: Acts 1 and 4 told the tale of Maxine Hoff, a cabaret dancer who was in Venning’s words “the haphazardly easy-going, wild kind of girl.” This was Tallulah’s role. Acts 2 and 3 concerned “Una Lowry,”a child of high society who frequented private parties and the ballrooms of respectable hotels. But it was this society girl, played by Audry Carten, who would come to grief. Maxine, in contrast, was unlettered, without pedigree, but was able to use dance to pilot her to love, fame, and social eminence.

  Maxine was sustained by a duality that Tallulah would make her own.

  She was a saloon dancer who realized herself through a free heeding of the appetites. Yet her affections were “not easily-won” as The Stage would later observe. Though Maxine was “somewhat of a siren,” as Cochran had written Tallulah, “she must be a lady.”

  “That first day Tallulah was only reading the script casually, of course,”Venning recalled. “The next day we had a more serious rehearsal and she was immediately doing things with the part. She seemed much more at home, and very eager. Apparently she was wildly excited about coming to London. And Gerald was obviously bewitched. He thought this was just the goods.”

  Directing her, du Maurier was able to impose a little fine tuning on Tallulah’s exuberance. The keynote of du Maurier’s own acting was his understatement; his films reveal a near-Kabuki-like economy of gesture and emotion. “She picked up everything Gerald said at once,” Venning recalled.

  “She never had to try and do it wrong and try again. Tallu was what we call a natural.”

  Du Maurier inspired not only additional control but additional release: both resources equally essential to an actor’s technique. Tallulah recalled in 1928: “Although naturally temperamental I used to feel almost awkward when playing emotional parts which called for tears.” She found it a great comfort when she discovered that du Maurier “always wept—real tears, even at rehearsal. As we had to cry a good deal, we two together flooded the theater every night!”

  But the cast had no inkling of reticence on Tallulah’s part as they watched their newest member get the feel of her scenes and sketch the dances she would perform. Indeed they were riveted by her apparent and very un-British lack of inhibition. In the cast was Nigel Bruce, one of the day’s leading actors, who later enjoyed a long career in Hollywood. Bruce felt a bit rattled by Dix’s departure: he fretted that it was not a good sign for the success of the new play. But his worries about the fate of The Dancers were soon allayed.

  “Well,” he observed to Venning, “we have got a pebble on the beach, haven’t we?”

  By now she was “Tallu” to almost everyone in the cast, and she and Audry Carten had become boon companions. When Carten was offered the second star dressing room, a small but private room, she asked that it be given to Tallulah. Needless to say, Tallulah accepted. Carten, Venning, and bit player Doris Cooper (sister to West End star Gladys Cooper) shared the larger room next door. “But we were in and out of each other’s rooms all the time,” Venning remembered.

  In Gerald, Daphne du Maurier’s biography of her father, she writes that“The pathetic, attractive, and strangely bewildered post-war product” that Carten played in The Dancers was “more or less built upon herself.” Like Tallulah, Carten suffered the early death of her mother and the neglect of a distant father. He had left Carten and three siblings in the care of a nanny, and eventually remarried. He was wealthy, but when it came to money, as with his attention, no more than a trickle was given to his children.

  When Audry had arrived at Wyndham’s in 1920, Venning was already there, having been a consistent feature of du Maurier’s casts since 1914.

  Venning watched Carten gain attention for a series of minor parts in successive du Maurier runs. Ten years older than Audry, Venning had come to love her like a tormented daughter or a younger sister who was plagued by doubt, stage fright, insomnia. When sleep eluded Carten, Venning was willing to drive with her thirty miles outside London into the countryside.

  Together they’d picnic under the stars, and then, in the wee hours, turn Audry’s car home again.

  The Dancers had been written to boost Audry to stardom. Du Maurier had sketched it out, but Viola Tree had done most of the actual writing, with Audry “very much in mind.” Well before the play opened, Tree had taken Tallulah under her wing as well, and no mentor’s plumage could have been more resplendent. Then in her late thirties, Viola was the eldest of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s three daughters. He had been the Edwardians’ greatest actor/manager. Author and actress, Viola was “weird beyond words,” recalled Venning, who was frequently baffled by Tree’s cryptic asides and her airy oblivion where the rest of the world was concerned.

  “But Viola had a wonderful nature in many, many ways, and she was a great artist, a very cultured artist, an intellectual.” Tree made several brief but unforgettable appearances in film in the years before her death in 1938, proving her persona to be every bit as singular as Venning had described.

  Tree was married to drama critic Alan Parsons. “Hubert Parsons” was the pseudonym picked to shield Tree and du Maurier’s joint authorship of The Dancers, a slyly joined amalgam of Viola Tree’s married name with a variant of her father’s first name.

  Daphne would later regret that her father never again collaborated with Tree. She saluted the polyphony wrought by two complementary sensibilities: “Gerald with his sense of drama, Viola with her sense of culture; Gerald with his eye for effect, Viola with her literary restraint; Gerald with his flair for public taste, Viola with her intellectual grasp of what is good and what is bad in art.”

  Tree shepherded Tallulah around her spec
ial isthmus of stage and society almost from the first day’s rehearsal. Years later, the great Edwardian star Mrs. Patrick Campbell recalled to a friend of Tallulah’s dining one night at Ciro’s before The Dancers had opened. Ciro’s was a soigné supper club entered by way of a balcony with a sprinkling of tables. Stairs spilled down to the main dining room. “Mrs. Pat” was sitting downstairs, the room crammed with stage folk, exquisitely groomed and dressed. Suddenly a rustle ran through the crowd. Stella Campbell looked up. In all her fifty-eight years, she had rarely seen so fresh a picture of female beauty as Tallulah was presenting, standing at the head of the stairs like the mount of Olympus, surveying the province that she clearly intended to rule. Nobody knew who she was, but the diners were riveted.

  Tree and her friends “were sort of staggered by Tallulah,” Venning remembered, and naturally, Tallulah did her best to make sure they kept staggering. At one party, Venning continued, “Tallulah turned a cartwheel and had nothing on underneath!” Nudity was the most effective weapon in her arsenal of shock tactics. She had already learned how to keep people at a distance by bringing them often indecently close.

  And yet, cartwheels to the contrary, Venning considered not Tallulah but Audry the more reckless of the two. It was Audry who indoctrinated Tallulah into a dizzy world of pranks and put-ons. Venning described a game called “Wind.” In the parlance of the day, one would “wind” somebody the way one would con them today. Walking along the street, they would spot a likely victim:

  “Monica! Oh!”

  “Pardon, I’m not Monica.”

  “Oh how stupid of me, oh yes, but you know me! Goodness, you remember those picnics we used to have. And my brother—he was mad about you!”

  Minutes of leg-pulling might be capped with: “Well, I’ve never been so hurt! I know it’s a long time, but it seems so awful that you of all people could forget me!”

  “And do you know, in the end,” Venning recalled, “the poor woman had given her name and tried to remember the picnics!”

  Another favorite gambit was the gate-crash. Tallulah and Audry would arrive disguised at a party to which they had not been invited, eavesdrop on the guests, and the next day report back to their host or hostess a tell-tale conversation that proved that they had crashed the festivities. There didn’t seem to be a single wrinkle that Tallulah and Audry—with Venning’s assistance—couldn’t and wouldn’t work out. They might be musicians, or conjurers, perhaps adjunct help summoned specially for a gala, but Venning always stayed outside, idling the engine of Carten’s getaway car. They never went as guests and they always promised to be back before long.

  “It was my intent to curb, and if possible, protect them from real disaster,” Venning explained. “I fondly imagined myself to be some sort of bulwark. I was a Mrs., and I’d gotten this quite definite feeling that I was respectable.” By 1923 her husband, eminent actor Malcolm Cherry, was critically ill and support for her small daughter was solely in her hands. “My husband was alive, but he was a complete nothing. I was the breadwinner and it was pretty grim, I can tell you.” It was grimmer still for a woman mindful of propriety to know that her husband was moldering in terminal syphilis contracted during his tour of duty in World War I. Du Maurier had arranged for a weekly stipend to be sent to her from the Actor’s Benevolent Fund, which he headed. “Money mattered terribly,” she said.

  Two girls looking for mother surrogates, Audry and Tallulah found Venning game and they, in turn, were protective toward her. “Ten pounds off her salary!” Carten and Bankhead would call to each other, a warning cry not to be too rambunctious or they would incite a fine from du Maurier. (In the days before British Actors’ Equity, producers were able to summarily deduct salary for alleged infractions.) “We mustn’t go too far,” they reminded each other. “Una mustn’t have ten pounds off her salary.”

  They learned that Venning’s mother’s maiden name was Percy, and so the two madcaps dubbed her “Miss Percy.” “We like it,” they sniffed, “it’s so precious and persnickety.” And they took it in stride when Venning marshaled her stiff-backed Irish propriety against them. After her husband died in 1925, Venning enjoyed a lengthy marriage with playwright Gordon Hamilton-Gay. Already during The Dancers in 1923, she was receiving the squiring-around-town attention of several eligible men. “Una never knows us when she’s with her beaux,” Audry and Tallulah teased her. “Jolly right I didn’t!” Venning recalled.

  Naps

  “When I was twenty-one I dreamed of being a star, and then marrying a rich man I was in love with, and having three sons, and racehorses, and gambling all night, and being a good wife and mother.”

  Sailing to London, Tallulah had envisioned the probability of Napier Alington calling at her hotel and had carefully plotted her response.

  She would let him wait a half hour in the lobby and then greet him with the frostiest of receptions. A few days after she arrived, Alington did call at the Ritz, but now Tallulah’s resolve vaporized instantly. “I started to walk down the stairs slowly to collect myself, the lift would have been too quick,” she recalled a decade later to Picturegoer Weekly, without saying who her gentleman caller was. “Then I started to run. Down the stairs I went, two at a time, and when I saw him standing in the hall, I simply squealed ‘darling’ in a high-pitched treble, rushed through the crowd of guests, and servants, and threw myself right into his arms. I’m afraid it rather shook the Ritz, and that young man rather more.”

  Alington’s father had died not long after Napier returned to England, and he inherited the title as well as Crichel, the family seat, which became a consuming interest of his. He and Tallulah resumed their affair immediately, although this was hardly the last time that he would be discomfited by her. Although privately louche—“no one was too discreet for Napier,”said their mutual friend David Herbert—he was repulsed by public breaches of etiquette.

  Like Tallulah, Alington had been deprived of emotional ballast and balance. His upbringing was not unusual for its time and place but would not be called ideal. His older brother Gerald had tried to separate himself from the family, but after his war injury was forced to return to Crichel, confined to a wheelchair. In Edwardian Daughter, Sonia Keppel describes Gerald Alington, months away from death yet needled incessantly by his own father; Lord Alington acted so callously that Mrs. Keppel upbraided him in no uncertain terms.

  Lady Alington, on the other hand, was said to have indulged her children hopelessly. It was bruited about that Napier and Lois, her two youngest children, were perhaps the product of a different union by Lady Alington; they were dark and rather Latin-looking, whereas her older children were fair and much more retiring. Lois, recalled by Herbert as “full of charm and like a Bacchante,” departed so far from the family’s insistence on external propriety that she ventured briefly into film acting in the early 1920s.

  With Alington, Tallulah inaugurated a pattern of pursuing most vigilantly men who were the least attainable. Tallulah could have seen in him a mirror of both herself and her father. He was as reckless as Tallulah knew herself to be and as distant as Will had been throughout much of her childhood. “Napier was impossible,” Herbert said. “He was a divine man, I adored him, he was a great friend, but he never could be faithful to anybody.” He was also bisexual, with “a very feminine streak,” as Herbert recalled. Tallulah, however, preferred to compete romantically with men than with other women, and certainly Alington’s exotic sexual proclivities may have attracted her. “Didn’t he used to like being humiliated and all that sort of thing?” Douglas Fairbanks Jr. asked in 1992. “Being a dog at the table and having his food served on the floor?”

  Perhaps Alington did not enchant Tallulah and his other friends and admirers as much as disarm them, initiate them beyond noblesse oblige into a world where time’s constraints could be bent any which way he chose. He was often hours, sometimes even days, late. “It was as if he’d bought time up, felt he could throw it about or dispense with it altogether,”galle
ry owner Rex Nankivell recalled to playwright Kieran Tunney in his 1972 Tallulah, Darling of the Gods. On the way to an appointment, Alington might suddenly indulge an urge to smell every flower in his garden, despite the delay it occasioned.

  Alington’s need to live in a world of his own apparently drew him to narcotic refuges, or perhaps drugs were one reason for his detachment.

  During Alington’s lengthy stays in Paris, “he got very much in the hands of the opium smokers,” Herbert recalled. “The old Princess Murat, Cocteau, the Marquis de Chamdon. Napier was smoking opium like mad.”

  He was “obsessed with death,” reports Anthony Busby, who is writing a biography of Napier’s sister Lois, “extremely aware of his own fragile health and mortality.” But he seemed to prefer defying death by doing nothing to postpone it and instead mining every day for as much sensual gratification as it could provide. He frequented a spa in Switzerland, but violated every rule of the cure that was administered. Alington drank heavily as well. Going out with him would have made it more difficult for Tallulah to keep her promise to her family not to drink. Her father had advised her to drink a glass of champagne as a precaution against seasickness on her trip to England. In her mind the drink may thus have seemed entirely harmless. She later claimed that champagne was the only alcohol she imbibed during her eight years in London, but she did drink a great deal of it. One of her favorite expressions was “and champagne was running in the scuppers,” and so it usually was wherever Tallulah happened to be cavorting, although when she was younger, liquor never became the problem it did in later years.

  “Tallulah opens in London at Wyndham [sic] Theatre tonight with Sir Gerald du Maurier,” Will wrote to Marie on February 15, 1923. “I have a letter from her full of happiness and hope. She is perfectly charmed with England and has received many nice social attentions from some persons of distinction. I wish you would write to her.”