Tallulah!

by Joel Lobenthal

  One afternoon Tallulah and Anders returned to Tallulah’s apartment to find Nada waiting. Tallulah inquired about seven-year-old David Mountbatten. “He’s just as cute as ever,” Nada said. “He came home the other day and said another boy was trying to take his pecker and masturbate him.”

  “What’d you say?” Tallulah asked.

  “I told him if he liked it to let his friend do it.”

  Anders thought it had been Nada who sent a gift backstage to Tallulah during one performance: a brooch studded with diamonds, but wrapped without fanfare, in plain tissue paper. Once he asked Tallulah about plans to spend the weekend at the Milford Havens’. “Oh, Glenn, I feel too tired to sleep four in a bed.”

  “What? What did you say, Tallu?”

  “Glenn,” she said, “don’t you know that he’s in love with you and she’s in love with me?”

  Anders claimed that these and similar revelations caught him unawares. “It would all add up,” he summarized, to Tallulah sighing with mischievous stoicism, “Oh, Glenn, you are so middle class!”

  As in her two previous plays, Tallulah’s understudy in They Knew What They Wanted was Beatrix Lehmann, who was a recent graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. Lehmann was a lesbian; she was lean and boyish, with a dark, rather ratlike face: a jolie laide if ever there was one. Her strange aura of frustration found fruition in a long and notable career.

  Lehmann was “very, very much in the picture,” Anders recalled. “Tallulah must have been in love with her. We were together all the time.” Tallulah, Anders, and Beatrix Lehmann went several times to stay with Beatrix’s sister Rosamund and her husband, Leslie Runciman, at their country estate.

  Rosamund was then writing her first novel, Dusty Answer, which began her distinguished career in British letters. Her brother John also became a noted writer, and Beatrix herself had two novels published.

  “Was I good tonight?” Tallulah sometimes asked Anders meekly after the third-act curtain had fallen. Anders never knew quite what to say; for him Tallulah was too alluring for the part. In the published script, Howard describes an Amy whose “loveliness is quite beyond belief. She is small and plump and vivid and her golden hair shines about her face like morning sunshine.” But it was Pauline Lord who had stamped the part in her own image when she created the role on Broadway. Lord “wasn’t ugly but she wasn’t barely pretty,” recalled Anders. His second-act encounter with Lord was a case of Joe capitulating to Amy’s irrepressible desire. “With Tallulah you always wondered why it wasn’t the other way. I could have been in love with her from the time I laid eyes on her in the first act.”

  Anders’s sentiments were echoed by Herbert Farjeon, who voiced in the Sphere a dissenting opinion on Tallulah’s performance. “For the first time since Conchita, I was disappointed in the performance given by Miss Tallulah Bankhead. . . . She does not invest the part with character of its own but rather absorbs it into her own personality, and so does anything but suggest a girl who would need to arrange a marriage by correspondence. She could find twenty husbands a day.”

  Anders remembered Lord in the Broadway production, delivering a resigned resolution in her soft, winsome voice. “No. I ain’t going. Why should I go? I like the country. This place suits me all right. I’m here and I might as well stick.” Hopeless and helpless, she sank into a chair as the first-act curtain fell. “Now Tallulah standing there, exactly as Polly did, still her body was too lovely, too healthy—no matter what she was feeling inside—for it to be the same.”

  Skylarking

  “Over here they like me to ‘Tallulah,’ you know—dance and sing and romp and fluff my hair and play reckless parts . . .”

  They Knew What They Wanted was the critical peak of Tallulah’s eight years in London, but it was not one of her longest runs. The houses were jammed in the opening weeks and then, to both Anders’s and Tallulah’s disappointment, audiences dwindled. Nevertheless, its three-month run could still have allowed Basil Dean to reap a profit: “Tallulah had now scored two box-office hits,” he writes in Seven Ages. Dean wanted Tallulah for his next, and as it turned out much more popular production, a dramatization of Margaret Kennedy’s shamelessly sentimental best seller The Constant Nymph. Dean writes, however, that Tallulah and he could not agree on salary. Tallulah may really have felt she could get more money, or the money may have been a ploy. For she must have realized how wrong she was for the part of Tessa, a seventeen-year-old waif who dies just as she is about to consummate her nearly lifelong infatuation with a married composer. Calling people’s bluff where money was concerned was a ruse of Tallulah’s. She had done it before accepting Conchita in 1924, and was still trying it decades later, when offered a part in a Frank Sinatra film. “Well, it wasn’t me,” she told her friend Cal Schuman, “and I said, ‘I’ll do it for $100,000.’ It was only about five days work. They said, ‘We’ll pay you $100,000.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘Darling, I was only kidding. The reason I can’t do it is I’m not right for it.’ ”

  Tallulah as Tessa “would have been the quaintest casting,” jeers theater historian J. T. Trewin in The Footlights Flickered. Tallulah’s rejection was the best thing that could have happened to Dean’s production, for in her place he secured a dream embodiment in the person of Edna Best. Dean may actually have been urging Tallulah to join the roster of performers that he engaged under long-term contract; however, she stayed freelance, although she acted again for him in 1928. Dean’s final words on the subject of Tallulah Bankhead are harsh, more so than one would imagine her obstinacy over that particular part or salary should have engendered: It seemed that my judgment was correct and that she might yet prove to be the star to guide me into financial haven. But I made no allowance for the rifts in her character . . . she lacked a sense of dedication that alone could overcome her lack of basic training. She was always an amateur—in the better sense of that term—approaching the theater, and indeed each aspect of her life, as an experiment, quickly to be dropped when unsuccessful. She told me once how as a child she used to rehearse gestures and facial expressions by herself in a long mirror, a form of narcissism fatal to integrity.

  Writing after Tallulah’s death, Dean was on target about some of the vagaries that ultimately eroded Tallulah’s career, but his linking of mirror gazing and artistic shortcomings is nonsense. The motivations of exhibitionism and narcissism are integral components to a performer, and they need not preclude more sophisticated artistic strivings. What would Dean have made of Vivien Leigh, one of the most intensely dedicated of actresses, who was in the habit of reciting her part to her dressing-room-mirrored reflection? Nor does Dean acknowledge the rifts in his own character—he was not just disliked but hated by many for his brusque and sometimes sadistic behavior.

  Dean’s sentiments, however, have been echoed by biographers and historians, revealing the same moralistic skew with which her life and career would come to be analyzed—often not overtly moralistic about Tallulah’s private life, but instead about her career choices. She has so often been accused of betraying her talent by selling out for commercial success, and while there is truth to the accusation, too often these chroniclers give the impression of being strangers to the realities of every actor’s life.

  “Because of my spendthrift ways, my scorn for tomorrow, I was never in a position to sit back and wait for a good play,” Tallulah writes in Tallulah. “Who in the theater can afford that luxury? Pressed for money, I had to take the first thing offered me. Always in debt, I was nagged by necessity. I couldn’t take time out to pause and reflect.” And yet, while all that is true, Tallulah is perhaps disingenuous in attributing solely to necessity the fact that she never again appeared in London in a play as good as Howard’s.

  It has been said that Tallulah deliberately picked poor plays, which is unlikely, since the more feeble the play, the more difficult becomes the actor’s task. But certainly she picked commercial plays, as well she needed to, since her father was no longer sending her mon
ey, and she was not only paying for herself but for a small staff. She was also perfectly willing to assist friends and lovers who needed money. She was subject to spontaneous rushes of generosity, prone to pressing large sums onto passing flower girls in the street.

  But lapses in Tallulah’s own taste must also be considered. She had said in 1921 that the 1890s pyrotechnics of Berton and Simon’s Zaza constituted the finest role ever written. (That absurd statement was attributed to her in an interview shortly after verismo composer Leoncavallo turned Zaza into an opera sung first at the Met by soprano Geraldine Farrar, who was an idol of Tallulah’s during her early years in New York.) Two years later, Tallulah could still “wipe out things absolutely and not see their value at all,” Una Venning complained. “If a thing wasn’t rip roaring drama, somebody wasn’t murdering somebody or going to bed with somebody, or doing something fantastic: ‘Oh, dull as a ditch.’

  “ ‘But Tallu, didn’t you see how subtle it was, when they’d come to the conclusion that it was the parting of the ways, and what were they going to do about it?”

  “ ‘Oh, balls!’ ”

  Tallulah’s comprehension of the theater undoubtedly continued to evolve. But although she gladly read works of philosophy and mysticism, when it came to theater, she always looked above all for the visceral response. Silvio Narizzano, who directed her in her last film in 1964, recalled discussing Britain’s Angry Young Men playwrights. Tallulah liked the emotion in John Osborne’s work but didn’t care as much for Harold Pinter; he was “too laid back,” Narizzano recalled, “too cool.”

  “Over here they like me to ‘Tallulah,’ ” she told New York reporter Milton Bronner, who interviewed her just as They Knew What They Wanted was about to close. “You know—dance and sing and romp and fluff my hair and play reckless parts. . . .” Of course she was not obligated to comply. Had Tallulah wanted to, she could have played Chekhov or Euripides with a number of theater societies that operated around London. She could have acted Restoration comedy at Playfair’s Lyric; it was there in 1924 that Edith Evans scored an epochal success in Congreve’s The Way of the World.

  If Tallulah had been determined to play Shakespeare, she could have gone to the Old Vic in the unfashionable Waterloo neighborhood, which had begun to attract talent of the caliber of Evans for limited-run repertory seasons. But “Shakespeare just was not popular in the commercial theatre,”

  Richard Huggett writes in his biography of producer Binkie Beaumont, the Bard becoming “unfashionable for the first time in 300 years.” What distinguished du Maurier’s career from previous actor-managers was his avoidance of classic drama. “There are few of us who do not prefer a single‘Oh-but-my-dear’ from Sir Gerald to all the music in Romeo and Juliet,”

  Hubert Farjeon declared semifacetiously in The Graphic in 1928. The great majority of the leading stars of the twenties were more eager to venture into the fashionably shocking realm of jaded morals and manners than in work that was experimental, obscure, or archaic.

  Gladys Henson didn’t believe that Tallulah was deliberately harping only on one gallery-pandering string. “Nothing she would have done could have surprised me. If I’d read Tallulah was going to play the Virgin Mary I wouldn’t have thought it odd. She’d have attacked it like a mad thing, but she’d be saying all the time, ‘I should really be playing Mary Magdalene.’ ”

  “New York audiences . . . are quicker and keener,” Tallulah had told Bronner. “They are more ready for the new things. If life and logic demand tragedy, they are ready for tragedy. . . . Londoners are more old-fashioned and sentimental. They hate to have the curtain rung down on pain and sorrow. . . .”

  Looking at the plays scoring the longest runs in New York during the 1920s, one may be skeptical at claims made for the relative progressivism of Broadway audiences. A case in point is The Gold Diggers, which was given its London premiere by Tallulah four months after They Knew What They Wanted had closed. Directed by the legendary David Belasco, The Gold Diggers opened on Broadway in September 1919 and ran well over a year in New York starring Ina Claire. Written by farce carpenter Avery Hopwood, it was fast and funny and cynical, but constantly equivocating about the nature of its man-fleecing heroines. Hopwood wrote to a friend describing the difficulties he’d faced. “No cinch to put a girl into that circle, keep sympathy for her, keep her clean, get her ‘a good man in marriage’ at the end and still let the thing be a fairly true picture of that life. I worked myself woozy over that scenario.”

  The four-month interval between the London closing of Howard’s play and the opening of Hopwood’s was the longest hiatus in Tallulah’s London career. Perhaps she had again put some money away and could afford an extended wrangle with Dean over The Constant Nymph. Or perhaps this was an extended period of career indecision.

  In early October, “a question of throbbing interest in London today”became the possibility that Tallulah might marry Prince Nicholas of Romania. In London to patronize the made-to-measure tailors of Bond Street, he was seen at a nightclub with Tallulah, with whom it was rumored he had been infatuated for several years. In her autobiography, all she discloses is that they walked home on Piccadilly at 3:00 A.M, when she decided to impress him by cartwheeling down the street. But when a reporter from New York’s American called to inquire, she stonewalled until cornered. The prince was only a slight acquaintance and not even, to her knowledge, in London. “But you were seen with him early this morning at a night club,”the reporter explained. “Well, he is only here for a couple of days,” Tallulah relented.

  In November she went into rehearsals for The Gold Diggers without illusion, describing it to cast member John Perry as “bloody awful.” But she had seen Ina Claire play it in New York and had realized its lucrative potential to provide a mightily entertaining diversion. In spite of its shortcomings, Hopwood’s The Gold Diggers is in retrospect one of the most important American comedies of the century, launching the long series of gold-diggers comedies on stage and screen.

  Tallulah was to play Jerry Lamar, ringleader of a group of Manhattan chorus girls. Jerry’s sheltered roommate, Violet, is in love with Wally Saunders, a socially prominent young man whose uncle and guardian opposes the match. Jerry tries to break down the opposition of Wally’s Uncle Stephen Lee by inviting him to supper and painting her own character in the blackest of colors. Sweet little Violet will look like an angel by comparison.

  Hopwood makes the character of Jerry very appealing. She has ambitions well beyond parading in production numbers. When one of Jerry’s friends asks her why she didn’t come to a recent party, Jerry announces, “If I’m going to be a Galli-Curci or a Mary Garden I can’t stay up all night.”

  Jerry is independent: “I’ve had measles and whooping cough and the mumps—but, thank goodness, I escaped love!” She is chaste. One of her fellow gold diggers describes how “Jerry always makes the men come across—and she never comes across herself!” Jerry is irreverent. Wally blurts out that his uncle “said you smoked—he said you drank—he said you sat up all night!”

  “What could be more ladylike?” Jerry asks.

  “You know, I’ve got it all thought out—this whole men and women business—so far as it concerns us!” Jerry tells her girlfriends. And in her banter with them, Jerry’s philosophy unfolds: “For it’s one of two things—either you work the men, or the men work you! . . . men will do a good deal for us now—but, oh, girls—lose your figures or your complexion—get a few lines in your face—get tired out and faded looking, and a little passé—and the fellows that are ready to give you pearls and sables now—well—they’d turn the other way when they saw you coming.”

  Couturier Edward Molyneux was providing Tallulah’s clothes for The Gold Diggers. In Paris for fittings, Tallulah ran into Napier Alington, who had never disappeared entirely out of her life. They dined at Jean Cocteau’s nightclub, Le Boeuf sur le Toit. Alington was going to take the midnight train for Geneva, where he was to be treated for his tuberculosis at
a sani-tarium in Évian-les-Bains on Lake Geneva. “Charged with both anxiety and affection I was my gayest,” so much so that Alington missed his train that night, and then for the next five nights. On the sixth attempt, they managed to deposit him on the train, but he hopped off with his bags as it was leaving the station.

  The following night they reported to a train, but the wrong train; it was leaving for Genoa. Instead they spent the balance of the night at Bricktop’s nightclub, before he took her back to the Hotel Chambord, and they arranged to meet in Switzerland. After she was finished with her fittings, she left for Switzerland.

  Tallulah’s sister was now living in Paris with her husband, Morton Hoyt. Eugenia loaned Tallulah her French-speaking maid for her trip to Switzerland. They checked into a suite at the same hotel where Alington was expected, but Alington was nowhere to be found. Tallulah spent the next two days frantically calling his suite, or standing on her terrace watching jitneys arrive from Montreux, hoping he might step off one. Then a Belgian whom Tallulah recalled only as “The Fox,” called and said he had been sent by Alington. The Fox “offered a lot of fantastic excuses which added up to the suspicion the fugitive was on a monumental spree.”

  Nonetheless, Alington’s return was promised for the next day. The Fox invited her to accompany him to the hotel’s casino, where she found Alington planted at the chemin de fer table.

  “Hello, Lulas,” he said blandly, and went on riffling his chips. “I decided to blast him then and there,” Tallulah writes, “but when he approached my rage vanished.” They spent “two magic weeks” together, then Tallulah returned to Paris, leaving Naps to “God knows what adventure.”

  Tallulah and her maid spent the night sobbing, the maid for a chevalier killed in the Great War, Tallulah because she surmised in Alington forces that she could not stem. “I knew he was doomed. I had a feeling he welcomed that doom.”