She said that she took Blackmail as a way to redress her mistake in not accepting Dugan. The author, Charles Bennett, was a young actor who had recently had his first play produced in London. He sold an option on Blackmail to producer A. H. Woods, who shuttled between London and New York, where he controlled the Eltinge Theatre on West Forty-second Street. Woods was walleyed: “You never knew whether he was talking to you or somebody else,” Bennett recalled in 1992. Also you didn’t know because he called everyone “sweetheart,” man or woman; he sweetheart-ed the way Tallulah darling-ed, until the endearment bounced back and became his nickname.
Woods was at that very moment considering casting Tallulah in a film version of The Green Hat, to be made in England by the prominent American director Marshall Neilan. According to Variety, a trade showing of His House in Order discouraged them and they decided instead on Blanche Sweet. (That she was married to Neilan may have played a part in their decision.)
Woods took Bennett to Tallulah’s home to read the play to her. She listened intently, as did “a maid,” who was probably Edie Smith, who served as a regular adviser to Tallulah, Bennett claimed, on whether a proposed script would suit the tastes of Tallulah’s gallery following. Tallulah said she would do it and Woods was so excited that he brought out two hundred pounds and threw them at her feet with a lordly gesture. Bennett was broke at the time and had to restrain himself from scooping up a handful of bills.
Bennett became a frequent guest at Farm Street, where Tallulah “plied me with a lot of very pleasant drink and a lot of very pleasant social life.”
He was a regular guest at cocktail parties that Tallulah hosted there. Having been “a rather unknown actor,” Bennett was thrilled to “suddenly find myself mixed up with all the big stars, the most famous people in England.”
As many as fifty or sixty people spilled into the bedroom, down the stairs, into the kitchen on the ground floor. “As I was new to that form of top cafésociety, she used to take great joy in presenting these people to me.”
Bennett recalled going to Farm Street once and finding her alone and in seventh heaven. “Oh, Charles, I do want you to listen to this record.” On the gramophone she spun Gertrude Lawrence singing Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch over Me.” She had spent the afternoon playing it over and over again.
Blackmail opens in the studio of artist Peter Hewitt with his penniless friend and fellow artist Ian Tracy helping himself to some food and drink before telling Hewitt’s landlady that he will wait outside. Daphne Manning, an artist’s model, has been picked up by Hewitt at a ball at the Chemil Galleries after a tiff with her fiancé, Detective David Webster. She comes back with Hewitt to his studio, where he drinks too much whiskey and forces himself on Daphne, who defends herself by stabbing him fatally with a bread knife. Ian has been watching Hewitt’s apartment from downstairs and knows all. Daphne spends all night and most of the next day wandering around London; when she arrives at her parents’ apartment, David is there and she confesses all to him. To exonerate Daphne, David tries to suppress evidence of her guilt, going to the length of submitting to Ian’s blackmail attempts. But then Ian is arrested by the police and charged with the murder. Daphne surrenders to the police rather than let him hang, but her prospects look good since David has forced Ian to swear in as witness for the defense.
Raymond Massey, who was acting by night in S. N. Behrman’s The Second Man, was engaged to direct. Originally, Daphne was a shopgirl, but according to Bennett, Massey and Butt decided that Blackmail be boosted up the social scale from the slummy end of Chelsea up to the posh Sloane Square area. Tallulah had not shown any aversion to playing a shopgirl and indeed was one of the few actresses in London who regularly played working-class heroines. Rewriting was mandated, and Bennett thought that the upgrading ruined his play.
In his autobiography, Massey tells a different story: Tallulah’s frequent suggestions about improving the script had irked Woods, and a few days before rehearsal started he told him to “get that Bankhead broad off my back.” Woods instructed Massey to mollify Tallulah. Accordingly he arrived at Farm Street by appointment, armed with the script of Blackmail.
Upstairs, Tallulah awaited him in her bath, her head and shoulders obscured by a fog of steam and soapsuds. Massey sat on a stool and listened to a ten-minute aria by Tallulah on “the care and feeding of theatrical managers and dramatic authors.” He left Tallulah’s, his script “a mess of pulp, and dizzy with the heavy scent of bath salts,” realizing that he hadn’t been able to reassure her about the script because he had hardly gotten a word in.
The next day, he had some minor surgery on an infected toe. When rehearsals began the next week, the initial reading went without a hitch.
Massey was apprehensive about spending all afternoon on his feet blocking the first act. He and Tallulah were sitting together in the orchestra when Woods appeared.
“Well Miss Bankhead, can we go ahead with the rehearsal?”
“Buzz off, Sweetheart, I’m talking to the director.”
“That,” writes Massey, “was more than Al could take.” Partial to extravagant gestures, Woods now executed one far less magnanimous than the shower of pound notes. He grabbed Massey’s cane, hanging on the seat in front of him, and made a violent gesture toward the script sitting in the director’s lap. However, his thrust went too wide of the mark and he brought the weapon down on Massey’s bad toe. Massey howled, Tallulah leaped at Woods, stepping on Massey’s toe in the process. “You walleyed old bastard,” Tallulah shouted at Woods, “you’ve hurt him!”
Tallulah followed Woods up the aisle and they disappeared into the lobby. She returned shortly and handed Massey’s cane back to him. “All right, darling,” she said, “let’s go. Sweetheart will be quite tame tomorrow.” Massey asked Tallulah how she had silenced Woods. “I just said to the old pirate that I was young and inexperienced, that I couldn’t stand violence, I just wanted peace and love and understanding, and would Sweetheart please for God’s sake leave me alone and let me work it out with you, darling!”
Nevertheless, Tallulah was “impeccably professional throughout rehearsals,” says Massey. But Bennett recalled friction. “Massey was in charge and determined to be so. He was tough and he was adamant and rather rude. Determined to get exactly what he thought he wanted in a person.” A dispute between Massey and Tallulah climaxed with her tearing madly at her pearl necklace until it ripped and the pearls scattered. Clearly, there was no love lost between Massey and Bennett. The playwright recalled:
“Raymond Massey never liked the play and he should never have directed a play he didn’t like. Whenever a director takes on something he doesn’t like it’s wrong from the word Go.”
When it opened on February 28 at the Globe, Blackmail provoked violent pro and con demonstrations following the final curtain. According to the Mail, “something like a vocal battle took place between the Bankheadites and those who put the merits of a play before the merits of a personality.” Tallulah was held accountable by the audience. “In the end the Bankheadites won,” the Mail declared, “but only by a narrow margin.” In the Sunday Express, ever-loyal Hannen Swaffer recounted that “Tallulah was booed . . . but did her dazzling best in very trying circumstances.” He casually reminded his readers that his was an insider’s report. Swaffer not only reviewed but wrote theatrical columns. “Even two of Tallulah’s persistent admirers, she tells me, booed the play. She got her revenge later on that evening when, hearing community singing at a late night cabaret, she and her party booed when the other half of the room was singing. Tallulah always takes her troubles with a bewitching humor.”
Some critics felt that her heart really wasn’t in Blackmail. “Good actress as she is,” The Era’s critic offered, “her emotional crisis as Daphne failed to move me.” She had been best in the seduction scene, which “would not, I imagine, have passed the Censor if he had seen the play rather than read it.” However, “after she had killed the man with remarkable dexterity
, she never varied the tensity of anguish. There was little in the writing to help her, but her anguish, expressed in gasps and sobs, seemed very hollow to me.” The Sketch’s reviewer laid principal blame on Tallulah. “Many of the scenes make for effect, but somehow we could not feel the inwardness of the characters; they all, more or less, bore the stamp of cliché. In saying this, I would not be unfair to the author; maybe, if the leading part had been differently expressed, we could have been more moved.”
But the truth is that Miss Tallulah Bankhead, skillful in the highest degree as she is, has neither the diction nor the power of an emotional actress. Often she slurs her words, and we only hear half she says; often she strikes the same strange attitude rather as if she were suffering from some troublesome physical pain; in outbursts she rarely strikes the heart-note, that peculiar accent that causes vibration in the hearer; we are always conscious of being in the theater, of the theatrical, of an idea that a producer may have tried to make an actress what is not in her, and so had made her sound artificial. As the play went on I tried to visualize other impersonators I could name in the part, and I felt the difference. The cri de coeur is one of the dowers of Nature; it is innate, and but rarely can be impelled. I doubt whether Miss Bankhead possesses it, however skillfully she may strike other chords of the human clavier.
Did Bennett agree that Tallulah had delivered his lines with undue speed or insufficient audibility? “No,” he insisted, “she just talked in a perfectly normal way and what she said could be heard.” He dismissed the critics’ gibes as “nonsense. Critics are idiots, most of them.”
The Sketch’s critic felt that it was a fatal mistake for Blackmail’s curtain to come down “at the very portal of its climax,” as Tallulah was marched to the police station, and he decried the lack of a trial scene to show “the heroine white-washed by the unwritten law.” The audience was reported glancing at their programs to see if there was indeed another act yet to come. But we might ask, would the outcome of the trial have been a fore-gone conclusion? Given that Daphne had agreed to return with Hewitt to his studio, self-defense might have been considered a gray area of grounds for acquittal. Many British jurors of the day might have believed that Daphne had gotten just what she’d asked for—particularly so had she been a working-class heroine. Making her upper-class might have served to ensure the audience’s sympathy. Daphne actually fits quite well into the morally ambivalent archetype to which Tallulah’s talents were so well suited.
Blackmail lasted only a few weeks. When the run was finished at the Globe, the rights reverted to Bennett, who claimed that no fewer than six tours of Blackmail at one time were wandering around the British Isles.
“But I’d taken it back to its proper time and period.” Hitchcock’s film adaptation in 1929 began Bennett’s long association with the director, for whom he later worked on the scripts of The 39 Steps, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Secret Agent.
Soon after Blackmail closed at the Globe, Bennett gave an interview in which he voiced his resentment at the changes Butt had ordered. “I told the truth about it,” he recalled. “I suppose I shouldn’t have.” Tallulah stopped speaking to him, but vented her dissatisfaction to the Sunday Express: she had been “roped into Blackmail,” and was sick of overwrought emotional plays. “Sometimes when the audience thinks that I am weeping because the villain has betrayed me, I am really indulging in a good cry over my personal affairs, and probably wishing things I would not tell you.
“I was tremendously glad when Blackmail came to an end. I always think a bad play is like a new dress that fits badly in part and has to be altered. At each trial a part has to be changed. When you alter something it automatically throws something else out of place. And so you can never forget that the dress has been practically remodeled. Consequently you never really like it and always wonder why you chose it at all. That is how I felt about Blackmail. Now I am hoping that my next play will be a real Paris model.”
Surveillance
“Hello, everybody, Tallulah speaking. I give you due warning I’m going to sing . . .”
A month after Blackmail closed, Tallulah was opening in a new play.
Mud and Treacle was shot through with talk of an intellectual nature that she could have imagined might silence critics of her previous plays.
Basil Dean was directing her for the fourth and last time. The script was by Benn Levy, who at twenty-eight had already had a couple of West End successes and in years to come would have many more. The cast surrounding Tallulah was again superb. Nicholas Hannen played a middle-aged socialist, Solomon Jacks, who visits a house party in the country, where he falls in love with Tallulah’s Polly Andrews. She is the daughter of a landed family and a distant cousin of his. Solomon has no objection to lust, but love is the one thing he cannot stand: “It is jumping into a river whose currents are compounded of mud on the one hand and treacle on the other.” To extinguish his own ardor, he extinguishes her life.
Levy introduced an attempt at innovation by opening the play with a tableau showing Tallulah lying dead on a sofa. The rest of the play proceeded as a flashback that begins three weeks earlier. Polly is discovered strumming and singing “Frankie and Johnnie” as she awaits Solomon’s arrival. Several competing bids are being made for her attention. One is by Hector Wilson, the local Conservative candidate, played by Eric Maturin in his third appearance opposite Tallulah. Polly, however, is politically liberal. She’s been helping a local Laborite, who is trying to establish a district Labor club. In addition, Polly is carrying on a flirtation with Archie Pretty, a man of leisure who is politically liberal and unhappily married. His wife, Pearl, a former barmaid, espouses the standard working-class prejudice against socialists as parasites. Pearl was played by Ursula Jeans, one of London’s fastest-rising young actresses. Polly’s mother, Daisy, was played by Mabel Terry Lewis, niece of the legendary actress Ellen Terry. Terry Lewis’s hawklike profile and patrician manner suited her for this über–grande dame, who takes a seat “as only women of her generation can.”
Daisy is full of acerbic comments about her daughter. Daisy explains that she had to foxhunt to retain her late husband’s affection. “Was it worth it, Cousin Daisy?” Solomon asks. “Why didn’t you divorce him?” “I was afraid I might get custody of the child,” Daisy replies. As in The Garden of Eden, however, the emotional core of the play resides in several intimate exchanges between mother and daughter. In 1993, Quentin Crisp still recalled a memory of Tallulah sitting quietly at the feet of Terry Lewis.
Also contributing their views on life and politics to Mud and Treacle are an agitating miner brought along by Solomon, as well as Archie’s father, who is hosting the house party, and the estate’s butler, who is revealed to be the anonymous voice behind a liberal political column in the local paper.
Levy’s play was very much a young man’s work, rather too clever for its own good. He aimed at a very ambitious hybrid; on the script’s title page he introduces the play as “A Comedy or perhaps rather a Tragedy. A Murder Mystery and a Shameless Tract in Three Acts & A Post-Dated Prologue.” In similar fashion the protagonists of the play keep underscoring its own artifice à la Pirandello. Polly, for example, is described by Solomon as “a kind of Noël Coward heroine; or at least moving in that direction.”
During the third act, Solomon drinks a great deal late at night, then summons Polly from her room. They confess their mutual love. Solomon is agonized at the realization that “I don’t care if I never do another jot of work again so long as I can love and be loved by you.”
“Well, what are you going to do?” Polly asks.
“I thought—seduce you or perhaps kill you.”
Robert Harris played Archie Pretty, Tallulah’s liberal admirer. Harris was four years older than John Gielgud, and during the 1920s it looked as though he rather than Gielgud was destined to become the great classicist of his day. Harris already had an extensive history with Dean. He had been under contract to him for several years after
graduating from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Harris had seen several of the leading actors of the day baited by Dean to the brink of tears. But Dean was never directly unpleasant to Harris, who sensed that the director knew it would crush rather than spark the young man’s talents. Harris didn’t think Tallulah would have been able to take direction easily from a man like Dean, for his fondness for “correcting people for the joy of correcting them” would have stuck in her craw. But “I’m sure they got along,” he said in 1982 with a twinkle, however. “She’d have the better of him!”
Years after the play, Levy had talked to Harris about Tallulah’s photographic mind: she had only to look at a page of script to commit it to memory. “He said that might be one of the reasons why sometimes she was difficult in rehearsals,” Harris recalled, “because weeks rehearsing a part she already knew, practically before rehearsals started, she found very boring at times.” But Harris had no specific recollections of difficulties during Mud and Treacle. “Rehearsals for that play were very happy ones.”
An ugly incident loomed, however, as the play prepared to open. After starring for Dean in the New York production of Coward’s Easy Virtue, Harris had left Dean’s aegis for another production before returning for Mud and Treacle. Harris discovered that his name did not appear on the“bills,” the posters announcing the production and cast outside the theater.
He was convinced that Dean was issuing a belated punishment for his earlier defection. He confronted Dean, who responded with a smug admonition to “work, and in time these things will come.” Tallulah asked Harris why his name had been omitted. Did he want her to speak to Dean about it? He was very impressed with her fealty but told her no. “That’s good,”she told him, “because I’ve got a bone to pick with him myself.” Harris never knew what hers was about.
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