Tallulah!

by Joel Lobenthal

  “Boy died for purity,” Iris announces, encouraging the belief that he killed himself when he discovered that her purity fell short of his ideal. In actuality he killed himself at the shame of having to disclose that he had venereal disease. For her pains, Iris must endure the denunciation of her dissipated younger brother, Gerald, whose worshipful attention to Boy is never quite explained.

  Iris decamps to the Continent, from which scandalous reports of her behavior drift back to London. She returns several days before Napier’s wedding to a conventional young woman is to take place. She asks his help in contacting her brother, who is dying of pneumonia. The inevitable transpires.

  Napier’s wedding proceeds, but Iris secretly gives birth to a stillborn child she had conceived with Napier. When Napier learns that Iris was blameless in her husband’s suicide, he tells his wife. She insists that he reunite with the woman he has really loved for so many years. This leads, however, not to Iris’s triumph but to her destruction; she believes Napier has betrayed her, robbing her of the one unselfish act she has committed.

  His need to protect her reputation reduces her estimation of him. She lies to him that his wife, Venice, is pregnant and sends him back to her, then drives her yellow Hispano-Suiza into an ancestral elm on the Harpenden estate.

  Overwrought as it was, The Green Hat hit the 1920s in the solar plexus by positing the thesis that coexisting with, and indeed exonerating, Iris’s ostensible immorality was a spiritual nobility that put to shame the condemnation of her upstanding accusers. Iris’s contempt for the British status quo is probably one reason why the play turned out to be a bigger hit in the U.S. than in Britain. “I despise our England,” Iris tells Napier’s father in a final confrontation in act 4. “I despise us. We are shams, with patrician faces and peasant minds. You want to bully me with our traditions. May God forgive you the sins committed in their name and me for ever having believed in them.”

  Tallulah and Arlen were friends well before The Green Hat became a bestseller. Tallulah claimed that an incident in the novel was based on a night when she and a group of friends motored down to Maidenhead and swam in the Thames. It was noted by the New York World in December 1924 that she was “spending considerable of her spare London moments”with the novelist and was already signed to play the part, although at that very moment she was pining for Rain while still starring in The Creaking Chair. As it turned out, Gladys Cooper had already been extended the right of first refusal on The Green Hat and decided to accept. It was racier than anything Cooper had done before, however, and she had second thoughts and withdrew. By then, Rain had eluded Tallulah, and she was thrilled to finally get the part of Iris March.

  Barbara Dillon played Napier’s fiancée, Venice Pollon. Dillon had been studying at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but was forced to leave before graduating because she needed to earn her living. She was as close to the sheltered Venice as Tallulah was to Iris. She had been on several tours of West End hits around the U.K., but The Green Hat was going to be her West End debut. “I was very shy, very nervous with everybody,” she said in 1982. Yet Arlen himself was short and visibly foreign and that made him less formidable. He would always be something of an outsider in England.

  “When I saw Michael Arlen I thought, ‘Hell, I’m not afraid of you.’ ”

  The production was directed by Nigel Playfair. Playfair was one of the preeminent, yet most elusive theatrical figures of the time. He worked in West End commercial theater and also ran the Lyric Theatre in London’s Hammersmith district, where he staged many classic revivals. “Nigel was very clever, but he got there very slowly,” said Dillon. Playfair didn’t come onstage and direct traffic, as directors were wont to do in those days. His direction was mild and Dillon approved. “He waited to see what you had to give and then he’d put something on top, whereas some of them just put something over you like a hood.” During rehearsals the term death wish was bandied about quite a bit. Iris’s downfall was discussed as the inevitable result not just of circumstance but an irresistible hunger for destruction that doomed generations of Marches.

  Dillon snuck to the back of the theater whenever she could to watch rehearsals of scenes she wasn’t in. She found that Tallulah was very intent on getting things “exactly right” and accepted Playfair’s direction without dispute most of the time. Dillon retained a vague memory of Playfair in the first row of the orchestra and Tallulah at the edge of the stage arguing about a point of stage business. “He was so quiet and obstinate. It annoyed her. I think he won,” she recalled, but Tallulah “would easily fly off if things didn’t go her way—if her dresser forgot something. It would blow over in a minute. It wasn’t simply a temper tantrum. She was a perfectionist. She wanted what she wanted and she knew what she wanted.”

  Tallulah accompanied Dillon to the fashionable Handley-Seymour dress salon on New Bond Street, where Dillon was going to choose her clothes for the play. Several of the other women in the cast were also being outfitted there, while Tallulah’s own costumes were designed by Chanel.

  One dress Tallulah advised Dillon to choose was a shade of midnight blue.

  At the dress rehearsal, Dillon looked down and saw that stage lights turned the blue to a less alluring dark gray, which she hated. Dillon had been in awe of Tallulah since the first rehearsal—“she had such a glamour about her you felt she could do anything.” Although Tallulah “was always perfectly pleasant to me,” Dillon could never escape the feeling that she had been set up. “After that I felt I must be very careful not to step in her light.”

  During the final weeks of Fallen Angels, Tallulah was performing at night and rehearsing The Green Hat during the day. It was not unusual, in those prolific days of live West End theater, for popular performers to pig-gyback performances and rehearsals. Fallen Angels closed on August 29, and The Green Hat opened on September 2, 1925. As had Fallen Angels, the play outraged the critics on moral grounds. The Times’s James Agate lived a furtively homosexual life, but he was still conventional enough to take offense that The Green Hat’s tribe had “no occupation save making love, if love be the word; and one would say that their world is like a deer forest in the rutting season, if it were not that the stag is a noble animal.”

  Tallulah’s performance was praised avidly in some quarters. Noel Harris in Theatre World admired her “dignity and air of tragedy” in the first act, although he felt she had brought “the character down to a lower level” in the torrid scene of act 2. The Mail praised Tallulah for her restraint, assessing that she “played quietly, and at times pathetically and always picturesquely,” and even contrasted her restraint to overacting in some other quarters: “She, at least, did not find it necessary to play upon the top note.”

  Leonard Upton played Napier. Upton had made his debut in 1919 at Playfair’s Lyric Hammersmith. Dillon found him “a bit of a stick. I don’t know what [Tallulah] thought, but I didn’t think he was a very good actor.

  He was a pretty face most of all.” Harris in Theatre World agreed, finding that Upton seemed “rather youthful to be caught in the maelstrom of great tragedy.” Dillon avidly watched Tallulah’s love scene with Upton, when Iris March visits Napier on the eve of his wedding; she wondered if Tallulah was able to elicit more than she had been able to. “She did, and it was quite powerful, but even so, he wasn’t up to her par.”

  Along with Iris’s final face-off with Napier’s father, this love scene is perhaps the most memorable episode in the play. Napier and Iris pass through various stages of awkwardness and recrimination before they finally surrender to each other. They are now thirty but seem to be reliving their childhood companionship and adolescent romance. Iris’s sexual rapacity is presented as a form of compulsion. “Shall I scratch my face—and make myself ugly? Shall I, Napier? I’ve had no fun for my beauty—only hell.” Arlen titillated his audience with this vision of debauchery as a form of masochistic servitude, which at the same time vitiated Iris’s transgressions, giving her more depth
than a remorseless temptress would have. The Evening Standard said that the scene was “undeniably moving, and reveals the beauty that slumbers even in the lady who has been described as a beast. Here we had Iris and her portrayer both at their best.”

  It was in The Green Hat that Tallulah first reaped a consensus of criticism for careless diction. Alongside its praise, the Evening Standard nonetheless noted “considerable difficulties for the audience in the way of inaudibility.” The Stage attributed her enunciatory irregularities to her five months in the Coward play, which it felt had left her “unable to get rid of the modern drawl, with slurred vowels and softened consonants” that she evinced in her long drunk scene with Edna Best. St. John Ervine in The Observer was of the opinion that the more Arlen’s “appalling dialogue” was muffled the better the writer’s interests were served: “Even so fine an actor as Mr. Norman McKinnel [who played Napier’s father] had difficulty in keeping his head above the sea of silly words in which he and the rest of the company had to flounder. Some of them went under. Others helped the author by being inaudible at times. But none of them . . . were able to hold up all the time.”

  Critics would fitfully take Tallulah to task for a Dixie-style elision of consonants throughout her career. Since this was one component of her very personal and distinctive style, she may have not cared. On the other hand, Tallulah later recalled that she had gotten very alarmed when“some idiot in the gallery” called out “Speak up!” at her. These were fighting words, for any difficulties in following a play made the gallery fans furious. “I was terrified that I wasn’t projecting,” Tallulah said, and she stopped smoking for a while because she thought it was impairing her diction.

  But what had likely taken place on the opening night of The Green Hat was something else. “There were some God-awful lines in ‘The Green Hat,’ ” Tallulah recalled in 1938. “Boy died for purity” was an utterance that, in her opinion, “human beings simply don’t say. 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.”

  But Arlen certainly may have. In 1927, he published his novel Young Men in Love, in which an American actress named Ysabel Fuller bears a distinct resemblance to Tallulah. Ysabel goes to London, where she is taken under the wing of the middle-aged Miss Estelle Van Herben, “one of a considerable body of women who in our time have disdained marriage.” In London, Ysabel becomes a musical comedy star. Passionate but shallow, she exerts a corruptive influence on the novel’s hero.

  One year after Young Men in Love, Tallulah delivered a postmortem on The Green Hat. “Although the book was so delightful, the play was undoubtedly bad—just full of lyrical lines that sounded out of place when spoken in modern dress.” Her verdict was shared by many, yet it may have been a shortcoming of her sensibility that she could not suspend her own disbelief in Arlen’s heightened rhetoric.

  In 1923, Tallulah had seen Eleanora Duse’s final appearance in London, when Cochran presented her in a special series of matinees. “She was magnificent,” Tallulah recalled in 1966, lavishing what was for Tallulah the ultimate accolade, that Duse was “as realistic and as natural as one would be today.” But the yardstick of reality that Tallulah treasured could con-ceivably also be located on the lofty plane of lyricism established by Arlen, even in the unlikely garb of contemporary dress.

  Perry Brownlow was a member of the Grenadier guards and an avid theatergoer; eventually he became equerry to King Edward. He was also Barbara Dillon’s cousin. Brownlow and Tallulah were having an affair and “my family very much disapproved of this infatuation,” Dillon recalled. When Brownlow squired Tallulah, Dillon and newspaper executive Richard Norton frequently went along as makeweight. One night Dillon went into Tallulah’s dressing room to borrow an evening gown for that night’s club hopping. Her dressing room was immaculate, a testament to the skills of Elizabeth Locke, who worked for Tallulah in her apartment and at the theater, “one of those marvelous dressing women,”Dillon recalled, indispensable to theater stars for their silently omnipotent maintenance. “There was nothing she didn’t know,” Tallulah’s friend and colleague Glenn Anders would say about Locke’s presence in Tallulah’s life.

  The theater business was still reeling from the economic catastrophe of World War I, and any run over a hundred performances was respectable. The Green Hat managed 128 performances, and Dillon remembered full houses up to the end of the run. She seemed to recall that Tallulah had announced she was leaving. “I think she’d had enough of it.”

  Dillon was not surprised, for “it was an awfully stupid play, such a silly story.” For her, too, the lyricism and the symbolic weight of the novel had been lessened by dramatization.

  Tallulah went so far as to say that she “grew to hate” The Green Hat. “I had to interpret the part of a morbid woman in a depressing atmosphere all the time,” she wrote in 1928. “I do not personally think that any woman can appear attractive if she is devoid of a sense of humor, as that woman was. . . . I did not enjoy acting in that play half as much as I enjoyed my part in ‘Fallen Angels.’ The one was as morbid as the other was gay.”

  Offstage and on, comedy was then and would remain her preferred métier, perhaps her favorite way to deflect emotional exposure. “It was very difficult to pin her down about anything,” Tallulah’s friend Stephan Cole said, “because Tallulah would say anything that fitted the moment and would be funny. She couldn’t resist it.” Cole asked her once why she’d gone into the theater, and she told him, “To meet men.”

  Humor was a buffer against life’s vicissitudes. “If she had a failure, she’d rise above it by making a joke of it,” Gladys Henson recalled. Onstage she found the audience’s enjoyment of what she did so intoxicating that she could often up the ante with as many embellishments as they would tolerate, even if it meant overriding the objections of an author like Coward. Just as much as drama, humor of course acknowledges life’s trials even as it turns them on their ear. Tallulah resented that comedy took second place in prestige and academic approbation. “I think comedy is the most creative and original thing,” Tallulah told John Kobal in 1964. “It isn’t just the author. You must create something out of yourself. And it makes me sick when nobody ever gets any award for a great comedy performance. Chaplin never got any award, although I cry more at his films than laugh, because they break your heart.”

  Something Different

  “Good thing I had me drawers on, wasn’t it?”

  The gallery, the highest tier of the theater, had been for much of the nineteenth century a refuge for prostitutes. By the 1920s the spectators who crowded into the unreserved bench seating were socially infra dig only because of their poverty. But they were nonetheless an established pillar of the theatrical community, even an elite of sorts. Raucous in their approval or disapproval, their opinions were consulted, or at least taken into account, by producers and stars. They were exceptionally loyal to their favorite stars, with whom it was not unusual for them to become personally acquainted. Bernard Bashwitz, a teenage gallery regular during the late 1920s, recalled two sisters who adored musical comedy star Jack Buchannan. “Jack was very good to them,” Bashwitz said in 1982, and at one Buchannan opening night, the sisters happened to be sitting next to people who hated the show. A skirmish nearly developed because the sisters “just couldn’t tolerate anybody saying anything against Jack.”

  Tallulah was acquiring a gallery following that was, according to Theatre World, “unlike that enjoyed by any other actress.” It was for one thing largely female; the gallery was sometimes called the “Gods,” and Tallulah’s fans became “goddesses.” Even by the norms of the gallery, its adulation bordered on the hysterical. Tallulah had become “almost overnight, the idol of all the up-and-coming generation of working girls,” Basil Dean writes in Seven Ages, “who saw in her the embodiment of their dreams of a free life.”

  Even the cheapest theater tickets made a sizable bite in the budget of t
he untrained working woman. Many of Tallulah’s fans were making no more than a pound a week, whereas Tallulah’s salary climbed by the end of the decade to hundreds of times that amount. Tallulah rewarded her zealous admirers with special acknowledgment, taking her curtain calls by lifting her gaze first to the gallery, then slowly lowering it until she eventually reached down to the stalls, the high-priced tiers at the back of the orchestra. “To me the attendance of the galleryites was a greater tribute,” Tallulah writes in Tallulah, “since it involved greater sacrifice, than the presence of the loafers in the lower regions.”

  As The Green Hat reached its closing, Tallulah was returning to Dean’s aegis. Dean had replaced Tallulah in Rain with Olga Lindo, an excellent young actress, and the play ran for five months, but Dean regretted not challenging Maugham’s decision, for he believed that Rain would have run a lot longer if Tallulah had starred. Dean offered Tallulah the lead in Scotch Mist, a new play by Sir Patrick Hastings, hoping that she and the very popular Godfrey Tearle would be able to rescue a script that Dean considered poor. Hastings was a prominent attorney and had been attorney general in Ramsay MacDonald’s government. Dean calls him the most prominent cross-examiner of the day, whose performances at the bar “possessed an acute sense of dramatic values.” Playwrighting was a sideline that Hastings plied with imperfect success. “Although his dialogue was terse and sharpened with caustic humour,” Dean writes, “none of his characters ever seemed to come alive.”

  Tallulah was Mary Denvers, the indiscreet wife of cabinet minister Sir Lawson Denvers. Tearle was equally well cast as David Campbell, a rugged, taciturn Scotsman. Mary proclaims at the beginning of the play that morally she is as spotted as a leopard. Her husband copes with her apparent infidelities by raining down upon her Hastings’s much-praised epi-grams. Mary is about to go to Deauville with Freddy Lansing, her latest admirer, when David, a friend of her husband and old flame of hers, suddenly returns to London from an African expedition. Sir Lawson and David have planned to go fishing at the ancestral home of the Campbells, situated in the wildest part of the Highlands. Mary is riveted and invites herself along. Adding to the mix, Freddy decides to tag along, too. In Scotland, while Denvers and Freddy are out on a long fishing expedition, David and Mary are left alone. He professes his love and tells her: “Every one of those men who you cheated is in this room, watching you now. You are going to pay us all.” Mary struggles, smashes a lamp, the stage goes dark, and the curtain falls.