The Gold Diggers was produced by Herbert Clayton and Jack Waller, two American partners who used Hopwood’s plays as a wedge to penetrate the London market. William Mollison, who was the brother of Tallulah’s Conchita colleague Clifford Mollison, had directed Hopwood’s The Best People earlier in the year and now directed The Gold Diggers. The play reunited Tallulah with Jobyna Howland, who came to London to repeat the role of salty divorcée Mabel Monroe, a part she had created on Broadway seven years earlier. Howland was a heavy drinker who “used to weave about like the Eiffel Tower in a high wind,” Clifford Mollison recalled. Now that Tallulah was almost twenty-five, Howland had probably stopped assuming her maternal pose, which must often have been a matter of do-what-I-say, not-what-I-do.
Before opening in London, The Gold Diggers tried out in the seaside resort town of Blackpool. William Mollison was awakened in the wee hours by a Blackpool hotel official asking if he could kindly restrain Howland and Tallulah, who were walking about the halls, stark naked, blind to the world, and turning the air blue with curses.
Opening in London two weeks later at the Lyric, The Gold Diggers aroused condescension, shock, and exasperation from the critics. “A very ugly picture of one phase of theatrical life in New York City has been painted,” said The Stage. The Times felt that the effort of Hopwood’s compromises between realism and palatability were all too apparent, citing the presence of “for sentiment’s sake an obviously respectable mother to banish any misgivings about the birth and breeding of our heroine.” Yet most of the reviewers were entranced by Tallulah’s performance. “Miss Bankhead does it amazingly,” offered The Observer. The Sketch averred that she had “displayed infinite resource and savoir-faire.” The Times complimented her “unflagging energy, and in the circumstances, surprising charm.” The Era found Tallulah’s acting “so good that almost one believed in the part, and that was no mean achievement.”
Jerry climaxed her second-act’s vamping of Stephen Lee with a giddy Charleston and cartwheel, and once again Tallulah’s dancing was a sensation. The Sphere called her solo “so expert that Mr. Cochran, who was in the stalls, might well have contemplated engaging her as a dancer for his next revue.” In The Observer, Hubert Griffith said it combined “all the scan-dalousnes of the worst can-can with all the grace of the best Charleston.”
The Tatler reported the decorous patrons downstairs emitting “envious murmurs of half-suppressed admiration” while the proletariat in the gallery let out “unstinted cheers.”
According to Tallulah, Adele Astaire told her that she had never seen a better dance, was ecstatic about the cartwheel, and was going to take up dramatic acting, “by way of reprisal.” But she thought that Adele was pulling her leg. “When a dramatic actress breaks into a dance, surprise has considerable to do with the resulting applause. . . . The unexpected always created a commotion in the theater. Think of the sensation Katharine Cornell would cause did she do bird calls or a turn on the trapeze!”
John Perry played a bit part in The Gold Diggers. A young man drunk on the theater, he made a point of watching Tallulah’s performance every chance he had. Since Tallulah and he both arrived at the theater quite early, they frequently talked before the performance. Once Tallulah complained that she was losing a laugh because Frederick Kerr, who played Wally Saunders’s family attorney, turned upstage as he said her “feed” line and the audience didn’t hear him. She probably said something to William Mollison rather than to Kerr himself, who was a star in his own right and“rather grumpy,” Perry recalled.
Perry had a talent for dancing, and Tallulah advised him to develop his gift by enrolling in a class at the Espinosa School, one of London’s most prominent dance schools. Perry got the opportunity to play a better part, but the producers insisted on holding him to his commitment to The Gold Diggers. Tallulah, however, intervened with the management and Perry was able to avail himself of that opportunity.
From London’s Ritz, Hopwood wrote to actress Fania Marinoff in New York: “I’ve been very busy with ‘The Gold Diggers,’ which is an emphatic success—with Tallulah scoring over Jobyna, which I think is rather remarkable.” In his late forties and at the peak of his success, Hopwood was burning himself out in a hedonistic frenzy, perhaps inspired by despair over his homosexuality and over his capitulation to the dictates of commercial success. A heavy cocaine user, he had less than two years to live.
“Oh, darling,” he wrote Marinoff, “Tallu I have had a grrrand time—are still doing so.”
Sex Plays
“Sometimes when the audience thinks that I am weeping because a villain has betrayed me, I am really indulging in a good cry over my personal affairs . . .”
During The Gold Diggers, Tallulah was having an affair with cast member Hugh “Tam” Williams, who played Wally Saunders, Violet’s betrothed. Williams was an excellent actor and a powerfully erotic presence, as his many films testify. He was a couple of years younger than she and married to a young actress, Gwynne Whitby. Actor Robert Flemyng said that Williams had had other affairs and would continue conducting them throughout his life, although at the time of his dalliance with Tallulah he had no intention of leaving his wife. Nor did Tallulah expect him to. But in time not only did Whitby know about her husband’s affair but, apparently so did the entire theatrical profession in Britain. Conventional wisdom placed all blame on Tallulah.
“The Tam thing was very bad,” Una Venning recalled. “Everybody thought it was disgusting of Tallu, although I’ve no doubt he did his part, too.” Although he remained friendly with Tallulah, Gerald du Maurier, for one, disapproved of her conduct on the grounds that by its brazenness she tainted the reputation of the theater. Motivated as always by conflicting forces, Tallulah could have enjoyed the way the visibility and exposure of the affair validated her desirability even as it guaranteed that she would again ultimately reap punishment.
Amid so much that was tempestuous in her professional and personal life, Tallulah sought to establish a domestic bulwark. In March 1927 she’d moved from Curzon Street to an apartment at 20 Hertford Street, but in December she signed a standard ninety-nine year leasehold on a tiny house, a converted stable at 1 Farm Street. Tallulah was now one block away from the centuries-old trees of Berkeley Square; this was one of the beautiful and pristine eighteenth-century neighborhoods still intact in London. On the ground floor there was a garage, kitchen, and bedroom; upstairs, living room, dining room, and two bedrooms. The house allowed her room for her first live-in staff. In the downstairs bedroom Tallulah installed a married couple, John and Mary Underdown, as butler and cook. Catherine Matthews, a cousin of Marie Bankhead’s who visited Tallulah in 1927, described 1 Farm Street to Marie: “Silver wood work, tarnish gold rug on the straight narrow stairway, a pleasant odor of onions—the kitchen and some servants & Tallie in her bedroom, colors there were pink and gold. Her dining room was small but nice—dark oak.”
Edith Smith, a young fan of Tallulah’s, moved into the spare bedroom upstairs as live-in secretary. Smith became an inseparable friend, confidante, and lady-in-waiting, who was almost as close to many of Tallulah’s friends as Tallulah was. “Edie was absolutely marvelous,” David Herbert recalled. “She worshipped Tallulah, but she used to give her hell sometimes: ‘You can’t behave like that. . . . Pull yourself together!’ ”
Smith had been working in the bakery department of a large department store when one day she saw Tallulah coming into the shop and quickly devised a plan to attract her attention. “Wedding cakes!” Smith called out as loud as she dared. “Wedding cakes, anyone?” Tallulah glanced her way and a long association began. (“Wedding cakes” remained Smith’s pet name for a number of Tallulah’s friends.) She was Tallulah’s age and had been raised in England, but her parents were German. It is doubtful that Tallulah could have tolerated a sexual competitor in her employ; Smith was plump and she was exclusively gay. As an employee, she was sensible and good-humored and discreetly firm.
The Gold Diggers played five months,
but weeks before it closed Clayton and Waller had brought Tallulah a new script by Hopwood. The Garden of Eden was adapted from a play by two popular German playwrights, Rudolph Bernauer and Rudolph Oesterreicher; it reaches us today as an emanation from the same lurid nightclubs and leering predators preserved in the contemporary German silents directed by G. W. Pabst. The prior August, the New York Herald Tribune had reported that The Garden of Eden had “been a sensation in Berlin” and would soon be brought to Broadway with Jeanne Eagels as star. Although this never came to pass, Eagels’s reputed interest was all the endorsement Tallulah would have needed, had she any qualms about playing in this frequently squalid melodrama, or she might, on the other hand, have relished the sensation that The Garden of Eden was sure to incite.
She was to play Toni LeBrun, a dancer in a Parisian clip joint, the Palais de Paris. After Toni repels the advances of a rake, Monsieur Glessing, she confronts Madame Grand about the nature of her business.
Madame Grand throws her out on her ear. Toni is rescued by a fairy god-mother in the person of Rosa, her dresser at the club, who reveals that she was once a baroness who fled some revolution-torn republic. Once a year she recaptures her lost grandeur with a vacation in Monte Carlo. Rosa takes Toni in tow and proceeds to adopt her after their arrival at the Hotel Eden. Toni falls in love with Richard Lamont, a young diplomat. On the morning of their wedding a snake appears at the Eden: it is Glessing, who, as it turns out, is something of a professional mentor to Richard. He tells Toni that he will be quiet about her past so long as she eventually agrees to come across. She refuses and jumps the gun by telling Richard who she really is; his relatives accuse her of snaring him under false pretenses.
Richard turns out to be a hopeless prig and careerist. He won’t confront Glessing because he needs to stay in his good graces for the sake of his career. Instead, he insists that it is Toni who must apologize to Glessing for calling him a scoundrel. Toni tears off the spectacular gown, veil, and jewels that Richard’s family had presented her and stands defiantly clad only in her lingerie before storming out.
Act 3 finds Rosa and Toni back in a cheap hotel in Paris. Toni is dubious about lucrative offers of magazine serialization and a musical role in a revue exploiting the fiasco. Enter Prince Miguel de Santa Rocca, who had been a guest at the aborted wedding. The prince—“that eccentric old fossil,” Glessing described him—has all the irony, generosity, and self-knowledge Richard lacks. Toni’s behavior at the wedding enchants him. He proposes marriage and promises her that sex will not enter into the equation. He tells her, “In twenty minutes I’ll be back for you with everything settled, if I haven’t had a stroke in the meantime.” Toni skips out to the altar telling Richard’s uncle Herbert, who has come to offer money in return for silence, that Richard need not worry about his career; she’ll be happy to put in a good word for him with the prince.
The role of Lamont enabled Tallulah to keep Hugh Williams close at hand, to engage him now as love interest, and play a long, very romantic scene with him in act 2. Barbara Gott, Tallulah’s colleague from Conchita, added to her gallery of grotesques the role of Madame Grand, proprietress of the Palais de Paris. Eva Moore was Toni’s foster mother, Rosa. Moore is known to horror-movie buffs for her impersonation of a raving inhabitant of 1932’s classic The Old Dark House.
The Garden of Eden’s first performance was in Edinburgh on May 23, 1927. A week later, it came to London. “What a night it was for the gallery girls when Miss Tallulah Bankhead, the darling of the goddesses, the fashion craze of the moment in the stalls, stormed, raved, and ranted her emotional way through the theatrical absurdities of Mr. Avery Hopwood’s latest comedy,” the reviewer who called himself “Trinculo” reported in The Tatler.
“It contains a ‘fat’ part for Miss Bankhead, in which that adored divinity, slim, shingled, and divinely fair, is given unbridled license to under-dress and over-act to the top of her bent. . . .”
Although Tallulah never needed much encouragement to overact, Hopwood’s script encouraged or even demanded such displays, since Toni is frequently in a state bordering on apoplectic. The Tatler described Toni’s flight from the cabaret: “Husky and huskier grew the throb of her voice, wilder and freer the confusion of her packing. Clothes flung here and there, upset, crammed back with feverish haste into a suitcase. What tears, what emotion! And what nonsense!”
“A preposterous conclusion,” the Evening Standard called Tallulah’s dis-robing at the wedding, “but so much more original than anything else in the play that the gallery breaks into spontaneous cheers.” It may have been preposterous or gratuitous on the score of logical plot motivation, but Tallulah’s keen instinct for theatrical effect could have induced her to accept the script based on that one incident. Hopwood often liked to work stripteases into his comedies. Here he was paraphrasing a hallowed gesture of divesti-ture, the rejection of trappings and appurtenances as a sign of spiritual integrity—even though Tallulah retained her exquisite silk lingerie.
The censure of the theatrical community over her affair with Williams was paralleled by something of a harsher tone toward her among the critics.
Theatre World wrote that “Her performance may save ‘The Garden of Eden,’but the cost will be too great to make it worth her while.” She was increasingly reprimanded for her theatrical mannerisms during the balance of her stay in London, begging the question of whether Tallulah was relying on them excessively or whether the critics had just latched on to a convenient topic. Was there increasing discomfort with the phenomenon of Tallulah, including, of course, her controversial private life? During the nineteenth century, an actress’s morality was considered a legitimate reason for censorship of her acting. By the 1920s that would no longer have been considered germane—at least officially—but the undercurrent remained.
Willful as Tallulah was, she “cared desperately about the critics,”Gladys Henson said. In 1940, Tallulah recalled that while in England, she had been taken to task for “my slouch walk, the way I held my shoulders, the toss of my head. But even though I antagonized them, they [the critics]gave me good advice. ‘Hold up your shoulders,’ one of them told me”—Tallulah was prey to the concave posture that was fashionable at the time—“ ‘and breathe deeply.’ ”
“I used to have a habit of throwing back my head because my hair was shingled and so very thick and heavy,” she wrote. “When I had to bend over, I immediately shook back my head without realizing I was doing it.To do it occasionally was all right, but to do it often was not so good, so I had to guard against the habit.”
Yet, as Tallulah well knew, mannerisms are essential to the success and identity of a star. Actors without distinctive mannerisms do not become stars, and do not inspire the adoration on which Tallulah thrived. Once Tallulah complained to du Maurier that no matter what role she played, many critics complained that she remained distinctively herself. According to Tallulah, his response was, “See that they say nothing else.”
The Garden of Eden was hokum, but Hopwood had done a better job than the critics acknowledged. The Graphic’s Hubert Farjeon was the rare critic to admit that “some of the dialogue is delicious.” The contrasting environments of tawdry cabaret and balmy Riviera playground were well evoked. The Garden of Eden filled the Lyric Theatre for seven months. Tallulah’s success inspired Archie Selwyn to bring the play to Broadway that fall starring Miriam Hopkins, after Jeanne Eagels had backed out of her original commitment. In 1928 Corinne Griffith starred in a Hollywood adaptation. If anything, the film is racier than the play script, since the Palais de Paris’s proprietress is now meant to be a lesbian, and even gets to undress Toni when Toni refuses to wear a certain costume because she claims it is indecent.
In the fall of 1927, Tallulah signed a lucrative contract to make her first British film, His House in Order, an adaptation of Pinero’s 1906 play.
Acting with her were Eric Maturin, her onstage ravisher in The Garden of Eden, and Ian Hunter, her adversary/admirer in Th
e Gold Diggers. By day she stepped into an entirely different milieu than she occupied at night in The Garden of Eden. Here Tallulah prowled a stately country home as Nina Jesson, the second wife of a British politician. Nina is a free spirit, a child of nature, and her husband and his late wife’s relatives compare every move she makes unfavorably to her predecessor. However, her brother-in-law rescues her when he reveals that the first Mrs. Jesson was an adulter-ess. Nina and her husband look at each other with renewed appreciation and decide to start their lives together anew. Nina was a very good role for Tallulah, and it is unfortunate that the film itself does not survive in any archive.
The director, Randle Ayrton, was an actor with almost no experience directing film. Film Weekly found his work inadequate, but said that Tallulah was “as good as might be expected; she is at least natural, in spite of the drawback of an atrocious make-up. . . . All the characters, with the exception of Tallulah and Ian Hunter, move about with a gloomy and unnatural manner which renders the picture almost destitute of entertainment.”
Perhaps Tallulah had taken to heart the critics’ outrage over The Garden of Eden. Doubtless she sought some damage control on the bad critical repute it had garnered her. By the time the play closed she had “decided I would never again play in any sex drama. I was sick of this type of play.”
Instead, as The Garden of Eden was drawing to a close, Tallulah signed a contract with Archie Selwyn to star in a new comedy by Frederick Lonsdale. Lonsdale’s drawing-room comedies were the equal of Maugham’s.
The only problem was that his new play did not exist except in theory, and Lonsdale was notoriously slow to produce. While she waited for Lonsdale’s script, Tallulah turned down Ann Harding’s role in the London production of The Trial of Mary Dugan, which was selling out on Broadway. Lonsdale failed to deliver the manuscript as contracted on January 1, 1928. Tallulah resolved to blast him when she next ran into him, but when they came face-to-face at a party she found him so charming she was disarmed.
Tallulah! Page 16