The next morning Mary is discovered alone and traumatized. Her husband tells her, “I remember a short time ago you envied the position of a prostitute. That hardly seems necessary now.” But it is now revealed that where there had been smoke there was not fire, another example of the requisite obfuscation of the time where the sexual behavior of a stage heroine was concerned. Mary is not really a bad woman; she has merely been living up to the pose invented for her by her husband. But though she is furious at David, he defends his aggression by telling her that she is being stifled by her loveless marriage and he is determined to revitalize her. She cannot deny that she has fallen in love with David, and Mary’s husband and Freddy disappear conveniently as the third-act curtain falls.
“I always found Tallulah extremely charming,” Hastings writes in his 1948 Autobiography, “and both my wife and I liked her enormously. Not only was she a delightful actress, but she was free from those exhibitions of the artistic temperament which are not wholly unknown in the theatre and can on occasions become a perfect nuisance.” An inducement to refrain from exhibitions of the artistic temperament may have been Hastings’s repeated effusions to the cast about how their acting abilities far outshone his script. “Her kindness to everybody connected with the theatre was remarkable,” Hasting writes, “and she was the most popular leading lady I have ever met.” Hastings recounts that at a dress rehearsal, her costumes arrived late from the costumier: Tallulah disappeared, but was soon found in the Ivy restaurant next door, ordering dinner for the three seamstresses who had worked overtime.
Godfrey Tearle was married to Mary Malone, a beautiful Irish actress.
Malone was intensely jealous despite the fact that Tallulah evinced no sexual interest in Tearle. Nevertheless, Malone attended every rehearsal,“making her feelings so obvious,” Dean recalls, “that everyone in the theater viewed the progress of this tea-cup comedy with secret amusement.”
When the time came to allot the dressing rooms, Malone told the stage manager that Godfrey would prefer to dress at the top of the theater, next door to the wardrobe room, where he would get more fresh air, and conveniently be well out of Tallulah’s way, since she was, naturally, dressing on stage level.
At the final dress rehearsal, both Tallulah and Dean were astonished to find Malone seated in the middle of the front row of the orchestra. When they came to the second-act climax, Tallulah emoted with such abandon that Malone was reduced to tears. It was, Dean writes, “as if her Godfrey were being raped before her eyes.” After the curtain came down, Dean was walking backstage to give the cast notes. Tallulah popped out of the door connecting backstage and auditorium, shot a look at Malone, and then said to Dean, “Good thing I had me drawers on, wasn’t it?”
On the opening night, Tallulah played with the same intensity, nearly breaking her arm in the second-act finale. “The part of the wife is the most exacting I can remember,” she told a reporter, “and I went on to the stage very anxiously. It is such a varied role, and in the second act a little realistic violence is necessary. I missed a step, and I can only blame that first-night feeling.”
“In my endeavors to be modern perhaps I had gone a little too far,”Hastings writes. “At the end of the second act there was considerable doubt as to whether or not Tallulah had saved her honor by the skin of her teeth. In fact she had not. That may be the reason why her many admirers were a trifle shocked.”
Newspaper magnate Max Beaverbrook hosted an opening-night party and let Tallulah write out the guest list herself. By her account, a large and eclectic turnout enjoyed a champagne-in-the-scuppers shivaree; it was not dampened by the derisive reviews that started to appear early in the morning. Read today, Scotch Mist seems equal parts meretricious romantic melodrama, bright comedy of manners, and one of the most mordant portraits of marriage on the rocks to be written between Strindberg’s The Dance of Death and Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But London’s critics had no time for it at all. “You should have heard the comments of the pit and gallery when they left ‘Scotch Mist,’ ” Hannen Swaffer wrote in the Sunday Express. “But for the general popularity of Mr. Tearle and Miss Bankhead there would have been booing.”
“Tallulah was really good,” Swaffer declared. “She gets better in every part she plays. She is of-the-moment and she looked really beautiful but only her good acting, and that of Godfrey Tearle saved the first night from absolute disaster. It was, at first cheaply cynical and afterwards, so brutal.”
The Era called her part “long and exacting . . . it is greatly to her credit that she extracted from it every spark of interest.” The Sketch reported cryptically that she was “somewhat undistinguished in manner, but she has had good training.” The Evening Standard said that she had “acted so extremely well as to minimize the slight exaggeration of Sir Patrick’s compliment,”given in his curtain speech, that Tallulah was “ ‘the first actress in England.’
In the first act, where she had some comedy, she was delicious.”
The day after the opening, Hastings came to the theater to commiserate with Dean and his partner Alec Rea. They were engaged in a frantic search to find a new attraction for the St. Martin’s Theatre. The box-office manager came into the room, a little dazed as he explained to them that his telephones were working overtime: everybody in London seemed to be wanting seats, and he had to suppress his initial suspicion that they were calling the wrong theater by mistake. That night and for a number of weeks they were sold out, but the run sputtered after a number of prominent moral arbiters, including the Bishop of London, issued stinging denouncements. Dean, however, writes that the public condemnations were what enabled Scotch Mist to last as long as it did.
In any case, after a couple of months Dean was offering Tallulah a prime opportunity in the role of Amy, a poor waitress in Sidney Howard’s They Knew What They Wanted. Howard’s third play had garnered the thirty-three-year-old playwright his first hit and a Pulitzer Prize after it opened on Broadway in November 1924. In New York, Amy had been created by Pauline Lord. Nearly forgotten today, Lord was one of the most revered stage stars of the century. A rather bovine, dowdy figure, she specialized in portraying waifs, strays, lost souls: in 1921 she had created O’Neill’s Anna Christie. She was just as expert in comedy, as she demonstrates in her one film, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, in which she stars opposite W. C. Fields.
Lord had decided not to repeat her triumph in London, and Dean welcomed her decision because “I was thinking all the time” of Tallulah. That was a bold decision on his part because the part was unlike anything she had ever done. He had to convince both Howard and the Theatre Guild, which owned the play; they were at first “violently opposed” to his choice.
Howard’s most lasting fame accrues as the author of the screenplay for Gone with the Wind, but he was one of the most versatile and prolific playwrights of the twenties and thirties. Many of his best works were adaptations of foreign scripts or historic themes: They Knew What They Wanted transposed elements from Cyrano de Bergerac and Tristan und Isolde to the Italian winegrowers of California’s Napa Valley. The plot tells of a sixty-year old vineyard owner, Tony, who has wooed Amy, a bedraggled “Frisco”spaghetti slinger, by mail with pictures of his handsome young foreman, Joe. Amy has accepted Tony’s marriage proposal and, as the first act begins, is about to arrive by train at the ranch. Tony is so apprehensive about con-
fronting her with his true appearance that he crashes his car and breaks both legs on the way to meet her. Amy decides to go ahead with the marriage because it offers undreamed-of security. But on her wedding night she falls into Joe’s arms. By the third act she is settled in her new life and genuinely attached to her husband, but discovering herself pregnant by Joe, she is about to flee with him. Tony, however, is willing to accept their child as his. Amy is content to stay with him, while the restless Joe moves on to another itinerant berth.
In London, Tony was played by Sam Livesey, with whom Tallulah had worked in The Creaki
ng Chair. Glenn Anders had played Joe in New York, and although a decade older than Tallulah, he had never visited Europe and was eager to make his debut in London. Tallulah had seen him act in New York, and his presence, his knowledge of the play, buttressed her decision to try something so different.
Anders’s first day of work in London was unforgettable for him. Alone with Dean, Tallulah and Anders began rehearsing their initial meeting in the first act, but before long Tallulah was giggling at what Anders was saying to her. She’d never heard the lines ladled out with the folksy drawl he used. From the front row, Dean issued a stern “Stop giggling, Tallulah,” and continued to deliver his customarily precise line readings and instructions.
As John Gielgud has recalled, Dean “would not allow people to think for themselves or develop their characters freely and his meticulous method of giving them every inflection and tone, before they had experimented themselves, made them feel helpless and inefficient.” Dean continued“picking on her,” Anders related, until after about twenty minutes Tallulah rose out of her chair and to Anders’s shock “just broke it up.” He didn’t recall “whether she said something vindictive or something angry, or nothing. But it would be like Tallulah to say, ‘Oh, shut up, Basil.’ ”
Tallulah led Anders away to lunch at the Ivy across St. Martin’s Lane.
Dean sat on the other side of the restaurant. Tallulah ignored him, but plied Anders with question upon question about the New York she hadn’t seen in three years. Around the dining room a ledge ran behind the ban-quettes. It was an off hour, thirty minutes after the lunch crush had begun to thin. Anders was taken aback at the cavalier way that Tallulah let Napoleon, a Pekingese that Alington had given her, scamper around the ledge. Suddenly another diner felt something warm and frisky licking her ears. “Oh, darling Naps,” Tallulah scolded, “come back here, you naughty little boy!”
After they went back to rehearsal, the afternoon passed without further incident. Tallulah invited Anders over to her apartment on Curzon Street, charging into the suite of tiny rooms. “Tallulah: talk, talk, talk, talk, grabs the hat, throws the hat down, and goes into the drawing room. Talk, talk, talk, talk—then another room.” By the time they got to the bathroom, Tallulah was stark naked and ready to plunge into the bath that had already been drawn for her by the meticulous Mrs. Locke.
Tallulah found Dean cold and flinty, as did most of the actors he directed, but “she accepted the fact that he was a good director,” Gladys Henson would recall. Surviving photos show a Tallulah integrated into the rural ensemble Howard had devised, and scaled down into the prosaic dimensions of his heroine. “Tallulah was trying her damndest,” Anders recalled. “She would do anything. Oh, God, how she tried!” Dean found Tallulah’s approach was “intelligent—no surprise that—and conscientious even to the dressing of the part”:
Her appearance in a wedding dress . . . was an obvious opportunity for display by anyone as fashion conscious as Tallulah, but she did not fall into the trap. She went off to buy the cheapest clothes she could find, but she wore them with such distinction that one of our women’s papers accused of her over-dressing the part.
Dean’s publicity chief immediately announced that her wedding dress and two cotton dresses with accessories cost six pounds in all.
Scotch Mist closed on May 3, 1926, a watershed day in British history: the first day of the general strike that paralyzed England. Workers in all industries walked off their jobs, but Tallulah continued to rehearse They Knew What They Wanted. With no cabs available, she took to standing in Piccadilly, flagging any passing car and announcing, “I’m Tallulah Bankhead. Will you take me to my rehearsal?”
“We didn’t have any trouble getting down to St. Martin’s,” Anders recalled drily. Nonetheless, the nine-day strike necessitated a postponement of the opening night, and Tallulah crossed the Channel for a brief rendezvous with the gaming tables of Le Touquet. When they finally opened in London on May 20, their reception was all Anders and Tallulah could have wished for. Anders never forgot Tallulah walking to the wings and bringing him center stage to “a hell of a hand: there were too many Americans in the house.”
MARVELOUS SUCCESS IN NEW PLAY, Tallulah cabled Will the next day.
SENDING NOTICES WRITING LOTS OF GOOD NEWS AM WELL AND HAPPY LOVE TO ALL TALLULAH.
Hubert Griffith in the Evening Standard wrote that while London had seen Tallulah “play many different parts, from very well to very badly,” she had never before “touched anything like last night’s performance in its strong, considered ‘drive,’ its strength and its subtlety.”
“She has got into the skin of this slangy, self-respecting, decent-minded waitress,” The Era declared. Tallulah had “exhibited the girl’s mind—her misery, her courage, her loyal acceptance of the consequence, with revealing skill,” reported the Times. The Telegraph wrote that “she shows us, as Amy, that she is a better and more versatile actress than we had been allowed to suspect hitherto.”
Despite Amy’s infidelity, this play did not provoke the squeamishness elicited by Tallulah’s earlier London vehicles. The Telegraph expressed its relief that she had been “for once allowed to get away from her studies in decadence.” Her transgression was extenuated by the Latin flavor and the American locale. For The Sketch, Amy “was the strong, matter-of-fact girl who had struck a bargain and meant to stick to it beyond one moment’s yielding to the call of youth—so natural in a sultry clime where the sun and blood radiate in intensity.” Furthermore, Amy was a monogamous woman who elected to stay with the husband she had grown to love. The Times was grateful that the passion of the second act was handled with discretion. “A little too much wildness, the least concession to pseudo-Orientalism would have made of Amy a trivial good-for-nothing.”
Anders recalled that onstage Tallulah worked in “complete sympathy”with him, and this sympathy was essential for their scenes together. A long duet in the first act counterpointed her tentative attempts at intimacy with the silence of the bewildered Joe, who is in the dark about Tony’s deception. The Times described how Tallulah “nervously twisted her handkerchief and made little advances to him, half-bold, half-naïve,” while Anders“stared and hesitated and swaggered in his shyness.” The scene was “extremely moving,” recorded Griffith in the Standard, and “magnificently acted.”
Their romantic encounter came at the end of the second act, a thun-derclap in an appropriately volatile setting. Oil lamps burn low in the living room of Tony’s ranch. Outside the grounds are hung with lanterns, while raucous and festive voices echo offstage from the nuptial celebration.
Tony has been put to bed and Joe plans to sleep outside; he talks to Amy as he puts together his bedding. “Joe doesn’t know,” Anders said about his stage character, “it doesn’t dawn on him that the scene is getting hotter. But the audience knows; they can feel it.” Joe points out many endearing traits of Tony’s, trying to encourage Amy toward her rightful place with Tony in their wedding bed. From time to time he lays a reassuring arm on hers, until finally she bristles—“Leave me alone, can’t you?”—and Joe instantly understands what her agitation is all about.
“Tallulah had a marvelous ability to make the audience feel what she was,” Cathleen Nesbitt recalled. When Anders put his hands on Tallulah, a little shiver went through her and “the entire audience shivered too.” Tallulah bolted into the garden and Anders ran after her. A man sitting behind Nesbitt remarked to his friend, “That curtain went down just in time, or we would have seen something!” Fifty-two years later, Nesbitt’s eyes lit up as she said, “I’ve never seen anyone able to create such erotic tensions, without any words! Tallulah left you breathless.”
During the play’s run, “we were together much more than we were apart,” Anders recalled. After the show he was invariably in white tie in case they decided to go dancing, Tallulah on his arm in short flapper che-mises. Tallulah “knew every inch of London” but preferred “odd places: not pretty, but good music, and you had to
be somebody pretty special to get in.” But they also frequented the ultraswank Embassy Club on Bond Street, the Prince of Wales’s favorite haunt, as well as formal balls in which they were announced by liveried footman.
“I never saw her take dope,” Anders insisted, but he mentioned glancingly their visit to an opium den in London. In her autobiography, Tallulah describes the same establishment, which occupied the top floor of a house in Chelsea. She recounts her initiation there into opium smoking, referring to this drug use as a onetime experiment. But given Napier Alington’s involvement with opium at one point, the drug would have had a particular fascination for Tallulah.
Nadezda, Marchioness of Milford Haven, was the daughter of a Russian grand duke and a descendant of the great Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin. She was married to Philip Mountbatten’s brother George. The Milford Havens were known for their sexual gamesmanship; eventually, the marchioness endured a terrible scandal when the custody suit brought by Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt over her daughter Gloria made public the elder Gloria’s affair with “Nada” Milford Haven.
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