Tallulah!

by Joel Lobenthal

  When the curtain rose on the first act of The Dancers, the audience saw a saloon in the wilds of British Columbia, a hangout for the ripsnorting locals. Sitting onstage was Tallulah, about to perform a cabaret turn on the saloon floor, decked out in fringed buckskin and a half-moon Russian kakoshnik headdress sprouting a half-moon of feathers. Tallulah’s solo was a whirligig of canonically “Injun” steps mixed with a lot of Charleston and a little ballet thrown in, too, for which du Maurier had insisted Tallulah report to Ballets Russes choreographer Léonide Massine for lessons. (In later years she frequently boasted that Massine had told her she could have been a great ballerina; then she usually twirled into a sample of what the world had missed.)

  Venning called Tallulah’s dance solo “magnificent . . . completely uninhibited.” Her exhibition over, Tallulah would plunge into the ensemble revels on the dance floor, cheered on by half the cast. Since many of them didn’t have speaking parts in the first act, they were positioned onstage in their street clothes playing customers in the nightclub. “It will be just as well,” one of the stage directions suggested, “if the actors in this scene have been smoking and drinking for five minutes before the curtain rises, to get the effect of having been there for the day and a thick smoke from all their pipes and cigarettes.” Du Maurier often provided an extra treat by planting visiting celebrities. Venning was delighted when one night she found John Barrymore sharing her table.

  The actors onstage applauded, murmured the latest gossip, and asked themselves, “What’s Tallu doing tonight?” No two performances were ever the same. “She did a lot of different things,” said Venning, “mind you, she kept to the outline.” The dance floor would clear and Tallulah would shout to the customers, “Nooow, I’m going to do so-and-so,” or grab a man and say, “Let’s do . . . !” and stir up a great commotion.

  Du Maurier played Tony, “a rather banished Englishman,” Venning recalled. Some conduct of an unconventional nature had brought him out to the wilderness, thousands of miles away from a moneyed and disapproving family. Tony owned the nightclub where Maxine carried on, and he, too, took to the cabaret floor. Du Maurier himself had a penchant for impromptu entertainment at charity benefits and the like, and according to the script he was here in act 1 asked to perform a recitation as well as a burlesque of Pagliacci’s “È finito.”

  Tony called Maxine “Swan Face” and hints of their budding attraction punctuated the color and noise of the saloon and its carousel of amusements as they conversed in Tree’s florid and allusive phrases. “I don’t mix up with men, like these women here,” Maxine tells him. “After all, we aren’t helpless like animals—helpless like children. . . .

  “All my theories go to pieces sometimes,” Maxine continues. “But I want, how I want, everything else to come first, then contact, contact, and you haven’t a little bit of love for me yet.”

  “Contact” is a derivation from Emerson, although when Tony asks about it Maxine tells him it is courtesy of Henry James, whose injunction to “just connect” comes in The Ambassadors. James, it turns out, is a favorite of Maxine’s. “Don’t you read him? A man once told me never to leave off reading Henry James and Bret Harte. I was a kid then and it seemed pretty stiff at first.”

  Tallulah’s Maxine was now out of her cabaret costume and wearing a simple skirt and blouse. Her hair was down. Du Maurier responded to her with the tender irony that he’d made all his own in this unforgettable not-quite-love scene. “Gerald never went in for a lot of dramatics,” Venning recalled. Du Maurier’s way was to shadowbox his affections so that his endearments came wrapped with a little mockery or casual chaffing. He gently took Tallulah’s hands while he smoothed her down, telling her about his long-pledged affections to a British girl waiting at home. “Give all that love, all that splendid beauty, to some fellow who’s worthy of it—and forget me.”

  “Never in any world!” Tallulah’s Maxine insisted. Later came word that an accident had eliminated all of the relatives ahead of Tony in the line of succession. He would have to say good-bye to Maxine and return to England to claim his inheritance. “The parting was very moving,” Venning said. “The audience had taken to Tallu. They were desperately sorry for her.” But the class consciousness with which those in the audience had been brought up made them wary: “Gerald was playing a titled man so they felt, ‘Well, it wouldn’t do; it wouldn’t do. . . . ’ ”

  “London audiences are much more demonstrative than New York’s,”Tallulah writes in Tallulah. “In New York spectators either clap their approval or remain silent. In London they grow vociferous in their appreciation, as they do in their dissents.” She remembered a shower of “screams and roars” greeting the fall of the first-act curtain, a squall so ferocious that it blew her, terrified, back to her dressing room. Sobbing throughout the next two acts, she was convinced they had hated her.

  “I have to work on my part, and go on and on,” Tallulah had said to Audry during rehearsals. “You come on, and in one act have grabbed them by the throat!” It was, Venning said with a chuckle, “only too true.” For in The Dancers Audry was playing a favorite melodrama perennial: the woman who erred. A single transgression could cost her everything: spouse, children, community. The fallen woman spent the rest of her life scouring her blemished virtue, struggling to “get back” to polite society . . . or taking the easy way out. It was a plotline beloved by the Victorians, a cautionary reminder. Society’s laws were inviolable; woe to those women who felt im-mune. While the unfortunate woman paid and paid and paid, the audience wept even as it ordained her punishment. In those days, violin tremolos sounded the curtain’s rise, signaling heartbreak and catharsis to come. In the twenties, pit orchestras still played ditties before showtime and entertained during intermissions. And onstage in The Dancers, the desperate one consoled herself by spinning a violin lament on the gramophone.

  At the fall of the first-act curtain, Una Venning scrambled up the backstage stairs, wriggling out of the street wear she had worn sitting in the saloon. Full stage makeup went on as well as clothes suitable for a personal secretary to a society leader: Act 2 opened in the home of “Mrs. Mayne,”guardian to Audry Carten’s “Una Lowry.” Mrs. Mayne was played by Lillian Braithwaite, a distinguished and formidable actress, who went from The Dancers to the lead in Noël Coward’s The Vortex, the play that began his playwriting success.

  Tony, now the Duke of Chievely, thought Carten’s Una Lowry had remained the same young woman he’d left in England. But she had become, in the words of London’s weekly The Sketch, “an erratic and neurotic night-bird” who was an easy mark for the temptations of the dancing life. Discovering herself pregnant by a dancing partner, she takes her own life rather than confront the duke with her secret. “Delicate, eerie, sensitive, nervous,” Carten’s acting “touched us all to tears in her desperate agony,”The Sketch reported.

  Reading the program, the spectator knew that the Tallulah Bankhead of act 1 was going to be back again in act 4. Now she was playing one“Tawara,” although actually she was still Maxine, but had become famous for those same Indian dances she had used to entertain in Canada. Tawara had outgrown the pinwheel flares of emotion to which she’d been prey in her early youth. The last act, Venning said, “was to show the years had gone by and she was now a stable person. And, aah, what a difference! Tallulah was so controlled, where before you’d seen her as a wildly fantastic thing with emotions of every description.”

  The duke appears in her dressing room. He is still haunted by the loss of his intended, but the passing years haven’t banked the fires of his and Maxine’s mutual attraction. With maturity’s new wisdom, Maxine understands all. With the old forthrightness, she doesn’t mind telling the duke that her ardor is still consuming.

  Sprung to continental glory, Maxine “Swan Face” Tawara has not mutated beyond recognition. She is just as forthright and unguarded as she’d been on the Canadian frontier. In this highly effective scene of acceptance, reconciliation, and new be
ginning, Tallulah was “very subdued and sincere,” Venning remembered. “Don’t let’s talk of how we’ve arrived to where we have arrived,” Tallulah as Tawara told du Maurier, “We can give each other our press notices to read and that will save time.” Instead she’d like them to measure “how much we have loved people,” and if they had been true to themselves: “whether as we grew we struck the right shoots of ourselves.”

  When the last-act curtain came down, dulcet chords of tragedy, romance, and sex had been expertly sounded. The Dancers showcased a triumvirate of star performances: the acting was praised even by critics who felt tears should be milked a bit less shamelessly. The Stage reported that

  “Miss Tallulah Bankhead, an American actress, made a palpable hit by reason of the sincerity and tenderness she showed as that unshaken follower of an ideal. . . .”

  “Miss Bankhead is the most natural thing that has ‘ever happened,’ ”

  The Era declared. “In Canada she is alive to the dangers of circumstances, able to take care of herself, and yet sweet and joyous; not a babe in Bohemia, but a babe of Bohemia—the healthiest and happiest product of professional life. She is just as good as the successful favorite of the Parisian stage.

  “The part is one which would lend itself so easily to exaggeration, to over-acting, to artificiality. These pitfalls Miss Bankhead avoids. Her performance was delightful.” The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News called Tallulah’s performance “really beautiful . . . reconciling us wholly to the Indian summer ending in which Tony Chievely swears with uplifted head to love and cherish her all his life (and do we not know how firmly he keeps his word?).”

  London cheered Carten and du Maurier’s performances, but the city was aflame over Tallulah. “There had been nothing like this since the days of Mrs. Langtry,” recalled theater historian W. Macqueen Pope. Doubtless at Tallulah’s urging, du Maurier wrote her father soon after the play opened. “A very beautiful and charming young lady who brags about being your daughter has made a great success at my theatre—deservedly—and everybody is very fond of her—rightly—even the King and Queen of England. Thank you for allowing her to come here. She is most welcome.”

  Tallulah wrote Will to report her triumphs and enumerate her celebrated admirers. Edwina and Louis Mountbatten had asked to be introduced to her. “Do you remember when they came to America and were made such a fuss of? It was rather nice their coming back to see me without knowing me, wasn’t it, Daddy? Ha, ha. I have not become a snob, darling, but being my precious daddy I know you want to hear everything that’s happening to me. . . . I am terribly happy but miss you all so. . . .”

  American readers were informed of her triumph. “Tallulah Bankhead has made a succès fou in London,” a columnist reported in the May issue of Theatre magazine. “I rather thought that Tallulah would be a great success on the other side. She has a quality of Yankee audacity and beauty combined with a smartness and breeding that would make her especially desirable in belted Earl circles.” American readers were kept informed as well that the seeds of a rapport between Tallulah and the Prince of Wales envisioned by Mrs. Bankhead had now possibly come to fruition. In New York, Zit’s printed a June dispatch from London: “According to theatrical gossip, the heir to Britain’s throne is now paying marked attention to Tallulah Bankhead, beauteous young American actress now playing here.”

  Breathing a heady ether of success, Tallulah “went haywire,” as she admits in her autobiography. That solo dressing room came in handy as a makeshift salon: “We made so much noise Sir Gerald had a door built on the stairway sealing off my room.” Sometimes Tallulah’s new friends had no compunction about having drinks sent into her dressing room, although Tallulah herself didn’t drink during performances. Sometimes they even took her to supper during the ninety minutes she was offstage. “This was very irregular, very unprofessional,” Tallulah later confessed. “I should have been ironed. I marvel Sir Gerald tolerated such nonsense.”

  But Tallulah and Audry must have both flattered the master and tried his patience. “Gerald adored her,” Tallulah’s friend Gladys Henson would recall, “in the nicest possible way.” Du Maurier himself was a master pranksman. Playing bait and switch with stage props, assaulting the unwitting with novelty toys—these were capers that kept depression at bay, daughter Daphne speculates. He had inherited a chronic melancholy from his father. Du Maurier was undoubtedly called upon to assuage the feelings of paternal neglect that Tallulah could never redress. In her autobiography, Tallulah flirted as intimately with her own emotional truth as she ever dared when she talked about the demands with which she straitened him.

  Six weeks into the run, du Maurier had decided he needed a two-week vacation; Tallulah and Audry would have to fall in love with his understudy.

  Tallulah upbraided him for abandoning her. “I fumed and fussed and made a nuisance of myself,” she writes, suffering “a recurrence of the pangs” she had experienced years earlier when Will had taken Eugenia for a private picnic one afternoon and left Tallulah at home.

  Tallulah moved from the Ritz to a service flat—an apartment with cooking and cleaning included—at 23 Weymouth Street in Mayfair. But soon afterward she wrote Will that she had decided to sublet it for several months. She was going to live with society singing teacher Olga Lynn,“who is the most divine woman and has been a great friend to me.” Lynn customarily rented a house for the spring social season and this year she was living on Catherine Street near Covent Garden. “She is much older,”Tallulah wrote, “but everyone worships her here and she has a lot of influence in every direction.”

  “Oggie knew everybody,” Venning recalled. “It was the right place for Tallulah.” Also living at Lynn’s for some reason was Gladys Cooper, who was at the height of her West End popularity. Years later Tallulah related that she had been in bed one night when Cooper knocked on the door and came in to say good night; Tallulah looked up and beheld a vision, the most beautiful woman she’d ever seen. She was fascinated by the way Cooper had started as a chorus girl, graduating to her first dramatic role as du Maurier’s leading lady. Over the years Cooper and du Maurier acted several more times together and she was his regular partner for lunch on matinee days.

  Hair bobbing had hit London in a big way. M. La Barbe, a famous Parisian hairdresser, came over every two weeks to London, where actresses met in the afternoons for tea and shingling. Tallulah was present when Gladys Cooper shed her wavy blond mane, and was “terribly upset to watch the parting, but she looked so nice afterwards that I felt just a little intrigued.” Du Maurier was one of many men who did not approve. He was chagrined when his wife, Muriel, submitted to the shears, and he“nearly went mad,” Venning recalled, when Tallulah decided to follow Cooper’s example. She ran to his dressing room, tossing her shingled hair back and forth. “Look, Sir Gerald!” Du Maurier, Tallulah claimed, drew a blank for a full minute before bursting into tears. He insisted that the play was now ruined. That was hardly true. But a scene in act 1, in which Tallulah let down her hair, combed it, and pinned it back up to the admiring murmurs of the audiences, was undoubtedly now modified.

  When summer came Tallulah demanded time off for her own vacation, although her contract contained no such stipulation. Du Maurier agreed, and Tallulah went off to Venice to share a small palazzo with Viola Tree and a band of friends, including Lynn and Sir Francis Laking, an in-dolent young man who became Tallulah’s court jester. Cole and Linda Porter and a tribe of international sybarites were all there to welcome her.

  Tallulah had never set foot on the Continent and “I was agog.” She went with her friends on a sailing jaunt her first day. Wary of the Adriatic sun, her friends pleaded to return quickly, but she was mesmerized by the flame-colored spinnakers of distant ships and kept begging for a few more minutes at sea. When they eventually headed for shore, the tide was against them, further delaying their return. Finally, they pulled up to the beach; Tallulah stepped out of the boat and collapsed on the sand. She was ca
rried to her cabana with a 106-degree temperature and a bad case of sunstroke. Her first day in the sun was her last for the entire vacation. “Belatedly it dawned on me that this was the fruit of my rebellion.”

  Surely the universe, having just presented her with stardom, had more good things to bestow. “I think she did honestly believe that things came her way if she asked properly.” She was quite game to fall to her knees and pray, anywhere and anytime, Una recalled, having witnessed supplications even in the living room of a friend’s house. Venning assessed Tallulah as“hyper intelligent,” but her intelligence could feed her megalomania, could make her a menace to life and limb, hers as well as bystanders—innocent or otherwise.

  In Tallulah, she recalls buying a pearl necklace “to prove to the toffs and my fellow players that I knew the score. What I proved was that I didn’t know the score. Eager to drive my own car, I hocked the pearls to buy a Talbot coupe.” Venning remembered a call from Audry: “Tallu is going to buy a car!” Una declined to accompany them, but soon they were regaling her about their jaunt. Audry and Tallulah had descended on a Mayfair shop that stocked show cars. “Tallu bought one, and drove it out then and there. She’d never driven a car before! She didn’t tell them, and laws were a lot more relaxed. She knew more or less what she had to do.

  And they got back to her place and after that she did take some lessons.”

  Six months later, however, Tallulah sold the Talbot so that she could redeem her pearls.

  Now that she had established herself, Tallulah was perfectly prepared to accept a marriage proposal from Alington; Venning recalled that throughout the run of The Dancers, Tallulah was convinced that one would be forthcoming. Marriage to Alington would have fulfilled a long-range scenario running parallel to Tallulah’s theatrical designs. “When I was twenty-one,” she told Denis Brian two years before she died, “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.” Yet, as a prospective husband, Alington certainly presented difficulties.