Her affair with him in no way precluded her virtual adoption by some of the most prominent gay women in London. Among them was Barbara Bach, a close friend of Somerset Maugham’s and a leading hostess married to a successful doctor with whom she shared an enormous house in Regent’s Park. Tallulah was also frequently in the company of novelist Radclyffe Hall, whose lesbian romance The Well of Loneliness incited a furor in 1928, and her lover, sculptress Una Troubridge. Another close friend was Gwen Farrar, whose music and patter act with Norah Blaney enlivened revues and music hall bills. Farrar played cello; Blaney noodled the key-board. “Of course nobody sang really bawdy songs in those days,” Quentin Crisp recalled in 1993, “but Gwen did sing songs which included such couplets as ‘Last night my Ma got plastered / She said that I’m a bastard.’
Norah sang sad songs: like ‘How About Me?’ ” Their appearance together provided as faithful a replication of a heterosexual dyad as their audiences would accept from a same-sex couple. Blaney was quite conventionally feminine, while Farrar shone with an androgynous and unmistakable glamour, her hair trimmed to a lank point across one cheek.
On nights when she wasn’t working, Farrar often hosted musicales in her home on the King’s Road, and Tallulah frequently attended. Farrar’s evenings at home were intimate and mellow, Tallulah being usually one of not more than a half-dozen guests. Ballets Russes star Anton Dolin was present for a midnight serenade Farrar performed in the street outside Tallulah’s apartment. Tallulah and several friends were chatting casually when a cello’s mournful strains rose to her windows. Then came Farrar’s voice, and her mournful strain: “I want my Tallulah baby!”
Risky Behavior
“When I first saw my name in lights, I thought it was the most obscene thing I’d ever seen in my life.”
From a triumph unprecedented in her career, Tallulah found herself in the worst professional disaster she had yet experienced. During the ten-month run of The Dancers, she believed that her future was assured.
Once the play was over, however, she was convinced that she had exhausted her prospects. “I consoled myself with the fantastic idea that I had been especially cast for the part,” she wrote in 1928, “and that some one would be sure to cast me for another equally ‘special’ part. But the months passed and I was forgotten.” Actually, Tallulah was out of work for only two months, but her words portend the insecurity that would lead her to make many career mistakes born of haste.
She did, however, turn down an offer she did not like from a management that she didn’t trust. Shrewdly, she asked more than she knew they would be willing to pay her, since she “did not want it said I refused a part.” Tallulah then “wondered fearfully whether Fate would punish me for that, and never give me another part!”
The play that she did choose was Conchita, a florid melodrama set in Cuba during the final days of Spanish rule. Though Conchita’s auspices had been favorable, it was probably the worst play she ever appeared in. It was written by Edward Knoblock, one of London’s best-established playwrights. Knoblock had been born in New York in 1875, but had become a British citizen in 1916. Knoblock’s Milestones, written with novelist Arnold Bennett, tracing the fortunes and travails of one family through the ages, had been performed in every nook and cranny of the British Empire. A year before Conchita, Knoblock received an “adaptation” credit on Ernst Lubitsch’s Rosita, the director’s first American film, in which Mary Pickford’s Spanish dancer bears every bit as much resemblance to Tallulah’s as the two titles would suggest.
Conchita was directed by Basil Dean, one of the most important figures in London theater, who was destined to play a significant role in Tallulah’s career. He and Alex Rea were partners, renting the adjoining Ambassadors and St. Martin’s Theatres. Tallulah had carried a letter of introduction to Dean with her to London. Perhaps by way of atonement for Heartbreak House, the Theatre Guild’s Lawrence Langner had described her as “a serious young actress, not at all satisfied with playing so-called ‘type’ parts.”
Conchita was to begin a coproducing venture between Dean and impresario Sir Alfred Butt, who were intending to present a “series of romantic plays” at the Queen’s Theatre. Conchita plied themes that could well have attracted Tallulah on the deepest levels: a sixteen-year-old serving girl in a rough inn at a small seaport in Cuba, Conchita was destined to enjoy the triumph of a Cinderella-like transformation, and to do so by claiming the legacy of her dead mother’s glory.
Knoblock understood the surprise value in having the audience discover that the most humble figure onstage is actually the star. Tallulah was first seen as a silent figure scrubbing floors, dressed in sandals and a tatty dress. Ben, an American sailor, strikes up a conversation with her. She is an orphan, and can neither read nor write. Her mother, a great dancer in Spain before moving to Cuba, had died ten years before, depositing her in the care of Tío Miguel, the innkeeper. Her closest friend is her monkey, Ching Chong, named for a jujitsu move that a Chinese acrobat had once taught her. Dancing is Conchita’s one pleasure; Tallulah danced in each of Conchita’s three acts.
Conchita attracts the eye of corrupt police captain, Don Pablo, who has just been ditched by La Rubia, a blowsy young temptress. Don Pablo demands that Conchita be scrubbed and adorned and made ready for his conquest that night. Naive as she is, it is not until well into the second act that Conchita gets wise to the trick. When Ben returns, he spars with Miguel and kills him. Just as Ben and Conchita are about to flee, Don Pablo arrives and the curtain falls. Throughout the third act, Don Pablo and Conchita play cat and mouse, until Conchita uses the Ching Chong maneuver to pin Don Pablo to the ground, then dances a fandango of triumph over his hog-tied body, before she and Ben escape together.
At the dress rehearsal, Conchita’s beloved pet seized her black wig and pulled it off Tallulah’s blond head. “I always thought that the monkey scored his success a day too soon,” she recalled in 1928. “If he had only repeated his performance on the opening night, the play might have been saved.”
Tallulah was far from the only first-rate talent to be trapped in Conchita. Especially considering the fact that she did not attend drama school, it is important to mention how many illustrious actors she worked with as a young performer, from whom she undoubtedly learned a great deal. Lyn Harding, who played the wicked Don Pablo, enjoyed a vogue for his portrayals of rakes and reprobates, while Knoblock had taken care to stock his play with a rogues’ gallery of supporting characters played by some of the best character actors of the day. There was Miles Malleson, as Lorenzo, a barber haggling with Tío Miguel over fees. Mary Clare was La Rubia, and Clifford Mollison was Pepito, a comically timid swain dumbfounded by his amorous success with La Rubia and completely dominated by her. Clare and Mollison had two short scenes together, one in the first act and one in the third, “and we stole the play,” Mollison claimed in 1982, “because we came on, did our stuff, like a music hall act in a way, and off we went.”
Onstage during the opening on March 22, 1923, Mollison could hear audience members making plans to meet the next day. The curtain fell “to the accompaniment of almost hysterical laughter,” reported James Agate in the Sunday Times. Conchita was booed, and for the first time in her career, so was Tallulah.
In a kind of euphoria at having survived the debacle, Tallulah went out with friends to Ciro’s, but this would be the last time she frequented that chic bastion. She was thereafter banned from the premises for allegedly having splashed a glass of champagne in Gladys Cooper’s face. Tallulah swore that it was Francis Laking and not she who had splashed Cooper. Indeed, Hannen Swaffer, in a report for the New York Post, implicated “a young baronet, who basks in the light of the footlights and who has conceived a great admiration for Tallulah Bankhead.” He had been “almost in tears over the groans and moans of the audience” during the opening night performance. At Ciro’s he saw Cooper laughing with a friend, and imagining her jeering over Tallulah’s debacle, he doused her. The next morning, La
king sent Cooper a note begging her forgiveness. She sent back word that she preferred being splashed on a nightly basis to continuing a friendship with him.
Conchita’s reviews were scathing. The Sunday Express wrote that the character of Conchita was “so simple as to be absolutely unreal.” The Stage accused Tallulah of making matters worse by acting “with too obvious an assumption of childish naiveté, ingenuousness and the ‘artless thing’ pose.”
“It is hardly fair to criticize the acting,” wrote the Sunday Express.
Given the audience’s hilarity, “the actors must have seen how hopeless was their task. Even so, Tallulah Bankhead was not capable of playing Conchita or of suggesting the type.”
She also received some praise. The Era declared that “The producer and the actors worked hard in their attempt to infuse life into the play.
Miss Tallulah Bankhead took advantage of the occasional opportunities afforded her as Conchita, and was all the time appealing and charming.” The Times described her “a lithe and lovely Conchita, a good dancer, and what her compatriots call a ‘good-looker’ into the bargain.” Hubert Griffith wrote in The Observer that as “the delightful Cuban barmaid ingénue,” she had exhibited her “talent for acting, her soft, hoarse attractive voice, and her obvious talent for dancing.” But the Evening Standard objected that she“hardly dances quite in the Spanish manner.”
In the cast of Conchita was also Barbara Gott, whose acting career was largely devoted to grotesques. Barefoot, in large brass earrings and smoking a cigar, Gott played Afrodita, “a shriveled old Negro hag of indefinite age.” The Era commented, “In many ways, it was the best part in the play.”
Tallulah was so ashamed of her own performance that she was willing to do whatever it took to make sure the play closed as soon as possible.
Every evening, she and her maid walked past a threadbare line at the box office and condemned the play in voices as loud as possible—presumably Tallulah disguised herself in some way. “I felt rewarded when I saw several people depart at the end of the queue, apparently considering the play not worth the wait. The fewer the audience the better I was pleased because I did not want people to see how bad I was. . . .”
Her colleague Clifford Mollison agreed, describing both Tallulah’s performance and the play itself as “insufferably bad.” He found Tallulah “horrifying. I hated her. She was all in all a woman I don’t like. You couldn’t really hold a conversation with her much—because she never listened. She was always thinking of somebody else. To be fair to Tallulah, I was just another young actor coming up, another member of the company.” He recalled, too, her complimenting him on his “Nice notices, Skiffy!” as he was called by friends, when she saw him at the theater before the second performance.
Mollison repeated a rumor then current in London that Tallulah was having an affair with Florence Mills, one of the stars of the revue Dover Street to Broadway, which came to London in 1923. This had actually been insinuated by Broadway Brevities in December 1922, when Tallulah was still in New York: “Was ever anything more in the line of sisterliness recorded than Tallulah Bankhead reported to have purchased six pairs of chocolate hose as a gift for Florence Mills?” Mills may have been the first in a series of female black entertainers with whom Tallulah was infatuated.
Long after Mills died from appendicitis in 1927, Bankhead spoke glowingly of her artistry, as did, it seems, everyone who ever saw Mills perform.
Conchita lasted only a week. Swaffer dispatched to the New York Post that it “was the only play which was unaffected by the omnibus strike, for it would have died anyway. ‘We cannot even give the seats away,’ moaned one of the management.” Experienced though he was, Knoblock himself was bewildered at the utter rejection suffered by his play. “Funny,” he mused to Mollison, “I thought it had color.” In his 1939 autobiography, Knoblock was still stung by the play’s failure, protesting that what he had really intended was “a melodramatic comedy,” a hybrid genre requiring defter handling than Knoblock claimed Dean was able to give. He regrets agreeing to Dean’s request that he not come to rehearsals until a week before the opening and alleges that the leading players were wrong for their roles. But the experience remained so painful (or Knoblock was so reluctant to provoke offense) that he neither mentions their names nor even the name of the play.
If nothing else, Conchita allowed Tallulah the thrill of seeing her name in klieg lights for the very first time. In her autobiography she talks of walking Audry Carten round and round Shaftesbury Avenue to view the marquee of the Queen’s Theatre when the lights were first turned on, a week before the play opened. But with the rush of gratification came the lash of something more conflicted. Decades later, during a pre-Broadway tryout in Baltimore, Tallulah would glance at a theater marquee similarly embla-zoned with her name and spit out with bitter bravado, “When I first saw my name in lights, I thought it was the most obscene thing I’d ever seen in my life.” In 1962, she again recalled the incident, saying she had burst into tears of shame, thinking of her grandmother’s oft-repeated dollop of Victoriana:
Fools’ names are like their faces / Always seen in public places.
The Bankheads only heard about Conchita one week after it opened, which meant just as it was closing. On April 1, Marie wrote an inquiring letter after seeing an item in a week-old issue of a London paper. Marie was the family’s delegated correspondent to Tallulah, although she received little for her pains except Will’s undoubted gratitude. Tallulah did not like writing letters as a rule, much preferring telegram or telephone. “Of course it hurts us very much,” Marie wrote in this letter, “that you are so disinclined to keep in touch with the members of your family in Alabama.”
Five weeks after Conchita’s closing, Tallulah was starring opposite two of London’s greatest stage favorites, Herbert Marshall and Cathleen Nesbitt, in This Marriage, a comedy by Eliot Crawshay Williams. A former politician, Williams had revised and expanded a one-act play of his entitled Rounding the Triangle, which had first been produced in London in 1921. In Rounding the Triangle, a young man is finding it impossible to break up with his mistress of five years, whom he first met when she was walking the streets. His fiancée, a progressive young woman, is not upset but calmly suggests that he continue to see her after they are married. Her tolerance offends his conventional sensibilities, and he tells her their engagement is off. His ex-streetwalker mistress, too, has absorbed his bourgeois prissiness and is equally outraged at the idea. Seeing him for the prig he is, his betrothed is happy now to give him up. But she has bonded with her rival, and announces her intention to mentor the young woman so that she does not go back to the streets.
In This Marriage, the fiancée was now Vera Farrington, similarly a representation of the modern woman who, reported the Christian Science Monitor, “has outspoken views upon subjects upon which the Victorian girl was presumed to be ignorant.” After four years, Vera’s marriage to Christopher Maitland has settled into routine when Yvonne, played by Tallulah, sets out to seduce Chris and succeeds. The Stage described the character of Yvonne as “ably and not offensively drawn by the author . . . not exactly the ordinary adventuress of melodrama or night-club.” Vera discovers the affair and summons Yvonne by sending a telegram signed with her husband’s name. Vera assures Yvonne that she recognizes Yvonne’s importance to her husband, and in fact has no objection to his continued relationship with her provided that Vera is allowed to retain the major claim on his affection. Yvonne is overcome at Vera’s selflessness and tells her that instead she will give him up. Chris returns home unexpectedly, and Yvonne hides behind a curtain, overhearing his confession to Vera. When it is over, she steps out of her hiding place and tells him what a good wife he has and walks out of their lives forever.
In 1978, Nesbitt recalled how impressed she had been during rehearsals with the accuracy of Tallulah’s reaction of surprise to Nesbitt’s proposal that they share her husband. “I remember thinking, ‘How clever she is.’ ” Nes
bitt was nursing her newborn son, and when she offered Tallulah the stage-level dressing room, Tallulah refused, saying that she would not think of allowing Nesbitt’s son to traipse upstairs. Nesbitt laughed at the way Tallulah seemed to presume that the infant would need to walk up the stairs himself every night. She found Tallulah “wonderful to play with, because she played to you, with you. A lot of people don’t mean to be bad, but you’re here and they’re there. With Tallulah you were playing with another human being. It was person to person.”
This Marriage enjoyed “a wonderful reception on the first night,” Tallulah recalled in 1928. But critical voices were decidedly mixed. It was felt that expanding the play from one to four acts had not improved it. Tallulah’s own reviews were good. The Telegraph wrote that “she plays magnificently in the sofa scene, making you realize that the unfortunate Chris had as little chance of escaping her fascinations as the rabbit has from those of the snake.” The Sunday Express praised Tallulah for “the discretion shown in the handling of the sofa and confession scenes.” Despite the names and talents of the three stars, however, three weeks later the play was shut-tered. “I really did think then that I was a failure,” Tallulah recalled, “the worst actress in London.”
Soon after, she heard that Will would be visiting London as part of a delegation from the U.S. Shipping Board. Determined to shine for him, she jumped into rehearsals for The Creaking Chair, a murder mystery written by Allene Tupper Wilkes and “revised” by Roland Pertwee. Tallulah said that she did not like mystery plays, but The Creaking Chair exemplified the comedy thriller, an emerging genre of the 1920s. “We saw a great deal of Tallulah,” Will wrote Marie. “She was precious and so attractive and looked superb. She certainly has made wonderful friends who seem devoted to her.”
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