When the act 3 curtain rises, Julia is discovered morosely eating breakfast alone. Jane’s husband, Willy, arrives and Julia tells him all. They go out looking for Jane, who in the meantime returns to Julia’s apartment and tells Julia’s husband, Fred. Finally Maurice appears, mitigating his belated arrival with the news that he has rented an apartment in the same building.
The women make up a yarn that Maurice is simply an old friend and confidant and the confession they have made to each other’s husband was really a ruse devised to make the men more attentive. Maurice invites the women over for lunch. The husbands reluctantly agree, until they hear their wives harmonizing with Maurice on a French love song that the audience knows Maurice used to woo the two wives. Alarmed, Fred and Willy dash out the door as the curtain falls.
Tallulah “came flying into rehearsals,” Coward recalls in his 1937 autobiography, Present Indicative. “Her vitality has always been remarkable, but on that occasion it was little short of fantastic. She took that exceedingly long part at a run. She tore off her hat, flipped her furs into a corner, kissed Edna, Stanley [Bell, Coward’s nominal director], me and anyone else who happened to be within reach, and, talking incessantly about‘Rain,’ embarked on the first act.”
When they opened on April 21, 1925, Tallulah’s crash preparation was in no way evident. She gave “a completely and brilliantly assured performance,” Coward recalled. The critics agreed. The Evening Standard found Tallulah “exceptionally beautiful and exceptionally amusing.” Hubert Farjeon in The Sphere said that she and Best had behaved “as amusingly as any women have behaved on the stage for a long time.”
But the play was excoriated on the grounds that its depiction of women’s adultery and drunkenness was indecent and unsavory. Coward said that he received hate mail from all over England. Some critics made a show of seeming to praise the acting against their better instincts. To the Sunday Express, Best and Bankhead were “excellent actresses doing an ignoble job nobly.” Comparable ambivalence came from The Tatler’s correspondent, who declared that:
The two people who came best out of the whole affair are Miss Margaret Bannerman, who retired from the cast, and Miss Tallulah Bankhead, who took her place, and gives a brilliantly amusing performance. The second act, when they have to portray all the various stages of becoming completely “sossled” is never once offensive, and it is often ridiculously funny. It was a triumph for both of them, more especially for Miss Bankhead. One slight exaggeration, and the whole act would have been thoroughly beastly. But I shall always remember Miss Bankhead’s smile of triumph when she suddenly and most unexpec-tantly [sic] uttered the word psychology without the word staggering all over the place, as it were, and she having to sit down, give it up, and say“brain” instead; as well as Miss Best struggling to be a “perfect lady” before the parlourmaid.
G. F. H. in The Sketch concurred that the “subtleties of the drinking scene cannot be adequately described. All I can say is that the disquieting incident is realized with a delicacy and point that deserved the unstinting applause they won from an appreciative audience.”
Coward had written a highly accomplished comedy, but the Observer’s Hubert Griffith was almost alone in considering the text to be equal to the comedic tropes of the two stars: “When Tallulah Bankhead’s acts began so subtly to fail to synchronize with her speech, and tipsy dignity to freeze her thought and gestures, I wondered if Mr. Coward’s material could possibly continue to support her amazing technique. It could. . . .”
As so often throughout his career, Coward’s characters were condemned for their shallowness and frivolity, for not being characters at all but rather pegs on which to hang quips. The Era called Julia’s maid the best-drawn character in the entire play. Yet flippancy is not necessarily a drawback in comedy or farce, where characters do function as levers of hilarity. It is not depth or specificity but instead clearly delineated types that often serve the comic muse most effectively.
Julia and Jane were not identical; Tallulah’s Julia was the dominant partner. Taken as a duo, however, Coward’s heroines provide a new and distinctive comic type that spoke to the wider awareness women gained after World War I. They are not exceptionally creative or brilliant, but sharp and eager to understand the world and themselves. Julia’s husband, Fred, balks when she tells him in act 1 that the first fine rapture of their marriage has gone and they have settled into something more companionable. She’s discussed it with Jane, she tells him, and in response Fred calls them“psycho-analytic neurotics.” He asks if she discusses everything with Jane,“even the most intimate relationships—us?”
“Yes, you know I do, I always have.”
“I think that’s dreadful—it shocks me.” But he admits that he does exactly the same with Willy. “I’m sure married life was much easier in the Victorian days,” Fred says.
Julia tells him, “If you think women didn’t discuss everything minutely in the Victorian days just as much as they do now, you’re very much mistaken.”
“But it was all so much simpler,” he says.
“For the men.”
“For the women too; they didn’t know so much.”
Julia corrects him: “They didn’t give themselves away so much, poor dears, they were too frightened.”
Fallen Angels is about Julia and Jane’s marriages, their shared love interest, the friendship between their husbands, but most of all about the volatile yet enduring friendship between two women. The play established them as conspirators in a way that could have made the male psyche of the time very uneasy. Fallen Angels acknowledged the possibility that respectable married women could lead secret lives, that they may have had sexual relations before marriage that were not reported to their husbands, that the prospect of extramarital relations is real even on the part of devoted wives. There were almost no female drama critics in London at the time. Had there been, they might have better appreciated the play’s subversive message and done less quibbling.
On opening night, Tallulah could not resist putting paid to the Rain ordeal by tinkering with one of Coward’s lines. “Oh, dear, rain,” she was to remark. Instead she spat out disdainfully, “My God, RAIN!” She was met with a wave of laughter by the knowing first-night audience. Talllulah was discovering her own voice, refining the comic possibilities of her delivery, a process that must have begun with Crothers’s Nice People. Indeed, her single greatest gift as an actress may have been her ability to imbue the most innocuous lines with subtle and ambivalent inflections, often tuning her gift to heightening comic response.
Fallen Angels provides ready material to experiment with overtone and insinuation. “No one could have got more value out of the impudently witty lines,” actor/director Sir Seymour Hicks recalled in 1938. He cited an exchange in act 3 when Julia tells Willy that Jane has run off with Maurice.
“I don’t believe it—you’re unhinged,” he tells her. “I’m perfectly hinged,”Tallulah as Julia replies. “It’s true.”
“These lines may not in cold print seem masterpieces of humor,”
Hicks wrote, “but their effect on the audience, for a large part of which the actress herself must be given credit, was electrical. In the jargon of the profession, they ‘stopped the show.’ ”
In 1978, Anton Dolin acted his recollection of these same lines, spitting out “I’m perfectly—” with affronted dignity, continuing with a pause before “hinged” that prepared the audience for an ambiguous edge on the word itself. It sounded as if Julia’s outrage were justified by the borderless world of depravity contained within the word hinged.
“I’ve had much too much to eat already,” Jane tells Julia’s maid Saunders during the act 2 bacchanalia. “So have I, but we must go on, it will keep up our strength,” Julia replies. In 1992, Quentin Crisp recalled attending the performance as a teenager. Tallulah read the line in a tone of stoic resignation that underscored “must.” The audience fell apart with laughter.
Coward writes that “there
was no sense of struggle” between Best and Tallulah, and said that the fact that they remained amicable during the run was “definitely a strategic triumph,” given that “their parts were about equal and that they had to play the whole second act alone together.” “Neither of us felt jealous of the other,” Tallulah claimed. She and Best took to attending parties together, entering hand in hand and announcing, “Yes, we’re still speaking. Aren’t you all surprised?”
Best was marvelously attractive and a superb actress, equally definitive in her renderings of commonsense British self-sufficiency and of tremu-lous, gaminelike poignancy. She was then married to Herbert Marshall, with whom she sometimes acted. Tallulah considered Best “one of the sweetest and nicest people I have ever known on or off the stage.” Yet according to Best’s daughter Sarah Marshall that did not prevent Tallulah from laying down a gauntlet to Best early in the run. Tallulah was to supply a “feed” line to Best, and thus elicit from Best a punch line. But at one performance Tallulah mumbled the feed line that Best was waiting for. Best was rather awed by Tallulah, but she wanted her laugh and so she mustered her courage. “Excuse me, darling,” Best improvised, “I didn’t quite hear what you said.” Tallulah dealt her a look and then mumbled the line once more. Best thought it would go on forever. “I’m sorry, dear,” she insisted, “I still can’t understand a word you’re saying.” Tallulah took the olive pit out of her mouth, very pointedly put it down on the plate, fixed Best with a stare, and enunciated the line with punctilious clarity. Best said her line and got her laugh. “And they were best friends for the rest of their lives,” Marshall recalled.
“I enjoyed every performance,” Tallulah would write about the run of Fallen Angels, but perhaps she enjoyed them more than Coward felt was necessary. “She was totally undisciplined,” Coward’s ex-lover Jeffrey Amherst complained in 1982.
Almost every item in the five-course meal Tallulah and Best consumed onstage was made from bananas. The cocktails they drank were really ginger ale; however, one night Tallulah decided to substitute champagne. Best took one sip and looked at Tallulah, horrified. Suddenly Tallulah realized the peril she’d put them both in: the dialogue and stage business required that they drink refill after refill during the next thirty minutes. It was difficult enough to speak clearly when her mouth was constantly chewing, let alone trying to do so with a thickening tongue. “I never drank so much so fast in my life,” Tallulah said in 1962, and yet she claimed that both she and Best stayed cold sober—“out of sheer terror, I guess.” Nevertheless their acting was so constrained that “we didn’t get one single laugh in a scene that was foolproof for laughs.”
“Tuesday she might give a performance that would knock your eyes out,” Amherst said. “Frightfully good. And then Wednesday night go off, and Christ knows what might happen. Noël got very cross with her, but she wouldn’t listen to anyone if she didn’t want to.” Coward later claimed that the “well-marked restraint” with which The Era said that the dinner scene had been handled gradually eroded. He was constantly taking offense on behalf of his scripts. In his opinion the pristine perfection of his dialogue could only be diminished by the embellished shtick introduced by actors. He had similar arguments with nearly every star who acted in one of his plays. With Tallulah, matters came to a head when Coward confronted her and tore her performance to shreds. They did not exchange words at all for three years, Coward later recalled. Visiting London in 1928, playwright S. N. Behrman witnessed “a minor, controlled spat” between them in Coward’s dressing room. Una Venning, who acted in several of Coward’s plays, said that “Noël admired her very much: her determination, her enjoying life her way,” yet his relationship with Tallulah would always be a little equivocal.
Tallulah told John Kobal in 1964 that of all the plays she had done in London, Fallen Angels was the one she most enjoyed, and perhaps there was a slight defensiveness in her caveat: “And I thank Noël for that. Always.”
Femme Fatale
“There were some God-awful lines in The Green Hat. . . . I couldn’t bring myself to speak the stuff. So I just mumbled the unbearable lines when the time came. The audience didn’t seem to mind.”
Tallulah was involved with innumerable men all through her London years. “I sometimes think that I was born in love,” she wrote in 1928.
“But I am always changing the object of my objections,” she admitted, but perhaps thinking particularly of Alington, wrote that “more frequently it is the object that falls out of love with me.” Her lovers ranged from French tennis champion Jean Borotra to American tennis champion Frank Hunter to British peer Lord Birkenhead. Next to no information survives about most of these affairs and how seriously she took them, but they seem to have been short and/or protracted but casual. What is apparent, too, is that Tallulah’s need to incarnate herself as a sexual adventuress was as strong as her need to have sexual adventures. “She wanted to be thought a very go-getting woman,” Gladys Henson said. What had begun in New York was now amplifying in London. She painted herself as a reprobate, broadcast her own wickedness. Her flaws became the butt of her own ironic badi-nage. “If anybody had something bad to say about her, she’d have said worse,” Henson recalled. “She was a very maligned lady, but she maligned herself more than anybody else did.”
Henson was a few years older than Tallulah, and had been on the stage since she was a child, before retiring in 1926 when she married Leslie Henson, one of the foremost comedians of the day. Henson returned to the stage in 1933 after they divorced.
Offstage and on, Gladys Henson was “a wit if ever there was one,” as Clifford Mollison recalled. Yet initially she was “terrified” at the idea of meeting Tallulah because of Tallulah’s own sharp and occasionally deadly sallies. Nevertheless they became close friends. “She was a darling,” said Henson. “I loved her.” Henson had her own pet name, “Lu,” that she alone employed. “She was kind-hearted—her heart was in the right place. She put on the hard boiled stuff all right, but she wasn’t really.”
Henson noted and accepted the disjunction between Tallulah’s intellect and her emotions. “She was clever as paint. You’d have thought she was a lot older than she was. She read a lot, you see. She was quite literary minded.” Tallulah was also “very self-centered,” Henson said. “She’d want to know everything that happened the night before, that kind of thing. But if you bored her she’d say, ‘Go away, you’re giving me claustrophobia!’ And we’d say it right back to her.” When Tallulah boasted excessively of her father’s achievements, “I’d yawn and say, ‘You’re at it, again, Tallulah.’ She was really just an ordinary human being,” Henson said, “in an extraordinary way!”
David Herbert found her less self-centered. Herbert was the second son of the Earl of Pembroke, who was an acquaintance of Will Bankhead.
Herbert got to know Tallulah after Will alerted Herbert’s father to her arrival in England. “A lot of actors and actresses are rather bores if I may say so, going on about themselves all the time,” Herbert said in 1993. “Tallulah didn’t, you know. She would be full of life in general, what was going on, general conversation—it didn’t always come back to Tallulah.” He found her “extraordinarily thoughtful,” interested in him, always asking, “ ‘How are you getting on? How’s life?’ ”
Irish dancer Patrick Healy-Kay became a star of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes under the name Anton Dolin. After a feud with Diaghilev, Dolin left the company, and in 1925 was dancing on a variety bill at London’s Coli-seum. From the stage he noticed a very beautiful young woman sitting in the first row of the orchestra every week on a certain matinee day. But he didn’t meet Tallulah until one week when she went backstage to visit Norah Blaney and Gwen Farrar, who were performing on the same bill. “Oh, you’re not tall!” she greeted him. “I only like tall men!” Her assaulting bravado did not faze him, and indeed Dolin was a firebrand who could give as good as he got. They became fast friends. “Despite all her flamboyant ‘I am, I am!’ she listened, too,�
� he recalled in 1978.
In her next play, Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat, Tallulah again impersonated a woman after whom she might have patterned herself: Iris March, a notorious adventuress who was one of the great literary heroines of the decade. The play was a dramatic adaptation of Arlen’s enormously popular novel of the same name. The son of Armenian immigrants, Arlen was fascinated by the British aristocracy and wrote novels about the romantic peccadilloes of the Mayfair set. His enraptured lyricism was comparable to Fitzgerald’s, but quite a bit more engorged. Arlen enjoyed a tremendous vogue before his literary gifts seemed to sink under the weight of their own excess.
In The Green Hat, Iris March is secretly engaged to Napier Harpendon, scion of a landed-gentry family. Secretly, because the Marches and the Harpendons are enmeshed in a Capulet–Montague enmity. Napier’s father considers the Marches immoral and forbids the marriage. Instead, Iris marries sports hero Boy Fenwick, who kills himself on their wedding night.
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