Tallulah!

by Joel Lobenthal

  When Mud and Treacle opened at the Globe Theatre on May 9, 1928, it was dismissed by many critics. Even its dialogue, which makes the play well worth reading today, was given short shrift. In The Era, however,

  “G.W.B.” said that it “may be an ill-balanced play with an ending that strikes one as anything but inevitable tragedy, but it does have the merit of keeping the mind excited all the time. Very few plays have succeeded in doing that. . . . Some of the dialogue is brilliant. Patches of talk between the mother and daughter were exceedingly witty. . . .

  “In the quieter and less flamboyant part than she has had lately, [Tallulah] was excellent as the girl, although she must correct the tendency to slur her words.” He suggested that she might profit from the example of Mabel Terry-Lewis, “whose diction was perfect, and who gave delicious point to every one of the clever lines Mr. Levy had given to Mrs. Andrews.”

  In the Evening News, “J.G.B” reported that Tallulah “gave one of her best and most careful performances as Polly.” The Evening Standard, however, said that her performance “revealed more effort than sincerity. Her technical brilliance is unchallengeable; she was effective in the quieter scenes; but her impassionate moments were the visible work of a crafts-man; they lacked the spontaneous vibration of the ‘art that conceals art.’ ”

  Tallulah’s alleged faults in diction are puzzling, since the zealots in the gallery used to get incensed over inaudibility. We will never know whether she simply felt some of Levy’s dialogue did not bear enunciating, or whether she refused to surrender her typically Southern mushiness—although by now she had acquired a distinctly British tone. Certainly the times were changing and diction was becoming more colloquial. In a 1927article for Theatre World, Kate Emil-Behnke, principal of a school of elocution and acting, wrote, “There is no denying that there is widespread criticism of the acting of the present day . . . not the least serious complaining is that it is impossible to hear what is said.”

  One must at least consider the possibility that Tallulah, as Brando did twenty years later, was employing a naturalistic style that was new and thus required acclimatizing. Our only audio evidence of Tallulah’s London dialogue is a brief lead-in to her rendering of the song “What Do I Care?”that she recorded in 1930. “Hello, everybody, Tallulah speaking. I give you due warning I’m going to sing. When you’ve recovered from the shock, if ever, I propose to warble to you in my very best Galli-Curci manner a little song all about—well, I give you one guess as to what it’s all about. . . .” She speaks in the clipped drawing-room tones of contemporary comedies of manners, making her words world-weary, insouciant, and suggestive. Her pace is quick but her words are distinct.

  A few nights before Mud and Treacle opened, Tallulah had attended her sister’s debut on the London stage. Eugenia’s second marriage to Morton Hoyt had ended, and she decided to try her hand at acting, using the name Eugenia Hoyt. She later recalled wryly to David Herbert how unfair it was that Tallulah had inherited their mother’s beauty and acting abilities, while“all I inherited was Daddy’s love of fishing!” Witnesses to Eugenia’s offstage conduct, however, were adamant that she possessed undeniable histrionic abilities. In The Barker, a carnival melodrama that had opened on Broadway a year earlier, Eugenia played a dancing girl named Cleo, an insignificant role that was little more than an extra part.

  In London Eugenia’s behavior was all too reminiscent of her sister’s.

  Eugenia was “a terrible man-chaser. She had a lot of fun,” remembered Ben Welden, who was in both the Broadway and the London productions of The Barker. Romantic leads Claudette Colbert and Norman Forster were also repeating their roles in London. Colbert and Forster told their colleagues that they had been married by the ship’s captain on their way across the Atlantic. Colbert, however, continued to live with her mother, who had made the crossing as well. Eugenia considered that the coast was clear. “One day she made a play for Forster,” Webster recounted, and “a hell of a scene” ensued between Colbert and her husband.

  In London, Eugenia set her sights on Tallulah’s own boyfriend, Tony Wilson, who told Tallulah that he was twenty-seven but was actually only nineteen when they began an affair. His older brother, Martin, was devoted to exotic pleasures. Decades later Eugenia recalled “his happy dust . . . Sister and I used to take it.” Yet it was not Martin but rather Tallulah’s spoken-for Tony with whom Eugenia began an affair. A terrible breach ensued between the sisters. For the rest of their lives, the simmering rivalry begun when they were children would inevitably rupture long periods of détente between them.

  Between Colbert and her own sister, Eugenia felt that London was getting a little too warm. Without giving The Barker’s producers advance notice, she stole back to the Continent and then to the United States, where Hoyt caught up with her and they married for the third time. Less than a year after The Barker, Marie would be writing Tallulah that Eugenia and Hoyt were in Miami, “where they have an apartment and runabout car.

  This means they are having a good time I suppose. Of course, Eugenia is very flighty and Morton is unstable and no permanent happiness can reasonably be expected of their marriage.” After her third marriage to Hoyt quickly collapsed, Eugenia returned to Europe, where she spent most of the 1930s. Glenn Anders said that the family considered Eugenia’s behavior a potential liability to their political stability. “Eugenia was absolutely taboo at that time,” Anders recalled. The Bankheads “kept Sister out of the country. They chased her out of America.”

  Eugenia and Tallulah did not speak for several years after their contest over Tony Wilson. But the matter didn’t end with their eventual reconciliation. “Tallulah never forgave her,” Stephan Cole claims. After Tallulah’s death Eugenia grumbled that she had not left her more money. Cole told her the cause was to be found in the way she’d behaved in 1928 and perhaps on other occasions. “I think she was mean to mind my taking those men,” Eugenia complained in 1971. “They weren’t worth a damn, really. I just thought they were attractive at the time—and I didn’t know they were hers!”

  Tallulah’s reputation was by now so tainted that her slightest indiscretion might backfire alarmingly. While she and Tony Wilson were going out, they had driven to Eton to visit his younger brother, smuggling him out of the campus under a rug in their car so that he could eat with them at the Hotel de Paris, a popular establishment in Bray, a village on the Thames River. Before long it was alleged that Tallulah had been responsible for the expulsion of no fewer than five Eton students, “owing to indecent and unnatural practices with them,” according to a Scotland Yard report that was opened to the public seventy years later.

  An inspector was assigned to scope out the Hotel de Paris. He ascer-tained that Tallulah was “exceedingly well known” there, and he watched her arrive on Sunday, July 22, for lunch at the hotel. Joined by friends, she spent time on the water, and stayed until the evening before driving back to London. But no underage men were with her, and “the story that several Eton boys flew over by aeroplane to Bray from Eton must be accepted with the greatest reserve.”

  A review of Tallulah’s professional and personal activities was nevertheless conducted. An inspector’s report noted that Tallulah “has appeared in a ‘sex’ play. . . . Although it is rumored in theatrical circles that Miss Bankhead is regarded as a sexual pervert, it has not been possible to gather any information to confirm this.”

  First Lord of the Admiralty William Bridgeman went to Eton to discuss the matter with the headmaster, who knew that Tallulah, had visited the campus, and “it had been conveyed to her that she must not do so again.” But Eton did not want to press any charges against Tallulah, and evidence of any legal breach on her part was nonexistent. The matter was then dropped, but Scotland Yard’s disapproval of Tallulah’s private life returned in 1934 to haunt her.

  Tallulah’s next play, Her Cardboard Lover, was certainly not going to dispel the aura of debauchery that was by now synonymous with her name. She was returning to
the genre of “sex plays” she had resolved to forswear after The Garden of Eden, but to a less louche specimen. Mud and Treacle had been an ensemble piece—Theatre World was dubious that Tallulah’s admirers would “relish seeing her relegated to the background for three-quarters of the evening.” Perhaps that was why it closed within a month. By contrast, Her Cardboard Lover was dominated entirely by Tallulah and her costar, Leslie Howard. It was an adaptation by Valerie Wyngate of a French farce written by Jacques Deval, who penned a string of hits in the 1920s and ’30s.

  In the U.S., Her Cardboard Lover had already been played by two actresses for whom Tallulah had the deepest admiration: Laurette Taylor and Jeanne Eagels. In 1926, Taylor tried it out of town but producer Gilbert Miller closed the play before it got to New York, feeling that Taylor, then in her early forties, was too old for the role of a capricious Parisian divorcée.

  P. G. Wodehouse was called in to tinker with Wyngate’s adaptation, and reportedly succeeded in improving the male lead but not the female; in 1935Tallulah would complain that the script was devoid of a single witty line. In the spring of 1927 it came to Broadway starring Eagels opposite Howard.

  Farce was not her métier, and Eagels was beginning the tailspin that led to her death two years later from a drug and alcohol overdose. Howard scored a personal triumph by carrying the play through to success.

  In London Howard not only repeated his role but directed as well. Tallulah knew Howard from New York, where he had played a supporting role in Danger in 1922. He had the sensitive look that she appreciated in men, and was an inveterate womanizer. Unable to contain his philandering, his wife took to perching backstage, glaring furiously at young attractive women in the cast of any play he was in. According to Tallulah, Mrs.

  Howard’s ubiquitous presence ensured that the furthest Tallulah got with Howard was the popular game of Sardines, during which bodies were stuffed into closets to provide an opportunity for furtive groping or kissing.

  Her Cardboard Lover opens in a casino in St. Jean de Luz, where an im-pecunious young pup, André Sallicel, declares his love to Simone Lagorce, a rich young divorcée, and is rebuffed, before losing ten thousand francs to her at the gaming tables. She suggests that to make up the debt he will for the next five months be her “cardboard lover”—employed as her secretary, he will pretend to be her lover as well, and do whatever it takes to keep her from her returning to Tony, her caddish, yet irresistibly magnetic ex-husband. The imperious Simone insists that her agreement with Andrécontain the proviso that their lovemaking shall be strictly for show. The play traces a gradual humanizing of Simone, who at one point is told by her maid that she is “too rich to understand,” that André is impoverishing himself trying to keep up with her lifestyle.

  The highlight of the play is act 2, which takes place in Simone’s bedroom, dominated by an enormous, opulent bed. André keeps testing Simone’s resolve not to make contact with Tony, and she keeps failing the test. André disguises his voice and telephones Simone in the guise of her husband, telling her exactly which kimono he wants her to slip into. Simone erupts in paroxysms of emotional and sexual need, tearing off her dress and heeding his instructions. André walks into her room and chastises her for taking the bait. But finally Simone does actually succeed in luring Tony to her apartment. André strolls out of the bathroom in pajamas and Tony stalks out of Simone’s apartment. In act 3, Simone realizes that she has completely worked Tony out of her system and she is able to reciprocate André’s love. He is cardboard no more.

  When the play opened in London on August 21, 1928, reactions ranged from amiable to dismissive, and frequently gratuitously so, but the acting was appreciated. Theatre World said that Tallulah had discarded “the mannerisms that have spoiled her work of late,” although this would seem to have been a play that invited as many mannerisms as possible. In the Sunday Times, James Agate wrote: “It has been said of the grand amoreuse that she must take the spectator into a world where there is one loyalty—the loyalty to Venus—and notions not having to do with the goddess are rendered what the metaphysician calls unlawful concepts. This actress is mistress of that world. . . .”

  The Stage’s unsigned reviewer said he had become an admirer for the first time: “She brings out the conflicting emotions of the part with a great deal of sincerity, and makes quite a pleasant thing of the young lady’s final surrender to her ‘honest’ admirer. . . . Miss Bankhead has certainly raised herself a step or two in the ladder.”

  Although it has been suggested that Tallulah targeted her choice of vehicles primarily to the gallery, this could not be entirely true, simply on economic grounds. The unreserved tickets in the gallery and in the pit—the orchestra section in front of the raised stalls—cost so little that even selling them out regularly could not be the major engine in a long-run success. Her Cardboard Lover settled down to a six-month run at the Lyric because all sections of the house were attracting patrons. (If Tallulah and Howard were even half as amusing as Marion Davies and Nils Asther are in the surviving silent film adaptation, Her Cardboard Lover must have been very diverting indeed.)

  Nevertheless, the taste and behavior of Tallulah’s gallery following were attracting new attention. News reporters on the daily papers reported that her fans had started lining up twenty-eight hours before the opening night curtain. (Although the wait did not demand constant attendance, for attendees could substitute a proxy of tiny stools hung with name tags.) Throughout opening night their acclamations were a raucous distraction from the action onstage. London’s drama critics now began to describe Tallulah as the prisoner of a cult that was foreclosing her professional options.

  The Tatler argued that Tallulah’s fans would turn on her if she pursued a different line of theatrical fare. “Film-fed Flossie who is nerve-shucked into ecstasy at the sight of discarded stockings and diaphanous pajamas, and thrilled to the fibre of her being by a divan bed and a tray of cocktails is prepared to scream her disapproval if her goddess should dare mount another pedestal.”

  Other critics sought to clarify the issue by separating Tallulah and her impersonations. Hubert Griffith of the Evening Standard said he wished to portray her as craftswoman rather than an icon deified so long as she maintained an onstage pose that corroborated an enticing public persona. “Miss Bankhead, even as the maid that milks, must be a good workman if she is to do her job well . . . no actress can play in the same play for two or three hundred nights (and be the chief attraction of it), without an enormous ex-penditure of vitality, hard work, and strict attention to business. . . . Is this a step down or a step up from the heroine who moves the gallery to envy on the imaginary grounds of her unlikeliness to themselves?” Griffith was not prepared to issue judgment but was adamant that “It is, at least, a step in a quite different direction.”

  Betrayals

  “Oh, darlings, I’ve been fucking all night!”

  Nineteen twenty-eight was a year of betrayals. Not only did Eugenia appropriate Tony Wilson, but Tallulah’s dream to become Lady Alington, which had remained fixed at the back of her mind, was squashed all but irrevocably: at the end of September, Napier’s engagement to Lady Mary Ashley-Cooper was announced. Ashley-Cooper was twenty-six, exactly Tallulah’s age, the eldest daughter of the Earl of Shaftesbury. Her beau ideal’s decision to marry was motivated in part, David Herbert claimed, by his desire to have children. Alington must have long ago decided that Tallulah would not be the proper wife and mother. His own mother may have helped him to that decision. Lady Alington was determined that Napier and his sister Lois be brought to some accommodation with outward propriety.

  It was seemingly on the rebound that Tallulah became engaged to Count Anthony de Bosdari, an Anglo-Italian venture capitalist. But her impulsive decision brought only more disappointment and frustration. Bosdari was “handsome, possessed of great charm, and the last word in confidence,” Tallulah writes in her autobiography. “He was smart, crafty, and a bit twisted.”

  She met h
im while on a holiday in Brighton with a lover of hers named Monica Morrice. In Tallulah, Tallulah offers the interesting recollection that it was Morrice who was first attracted to Bosdari and asked Tallulah to send a note to his table. Back in London, he sent her a letter that“stated brazenly he was going to marry me.” Three days later he showed up at Farm Street and told her butler that he wasn’t going to leave until she agreed. After the rejections of that year, Tallulah was susceptible to being swept off her feet. “I didn’t know how to cope with so rugged a Romeo!”

  In late November, she wrote to “Daddy Darling: Now darling hold your breath and promise not to tell a soul except Florence because it’s a great secret but I’m going to be married at Xmas.” She inventoried Bosdari’s social, educational, and financial accomplishments in the tone of hyperbole that informed all of her letters to her father. She was going into such detail “so you will see I’m marrying a man that you will appreciate and love.” Bosdari loved music and he danced “better than any one in the world which is very important because you know what happened to the man who wouldn’t dance with his wife and apart from this I love him so there. . . .” Bosdari had given her “the most beautiful diamond necklace and a Rolls Royce. . . . He also thinks it would be rather chic for me to pick him up at the office. Just a model wife you know. I don’t have to give up the stage unless I want to but he thinks I will want to. He’s usually right.”

  She might genuinely have welcomed, at least temporarily, the prospect of an early retirement. Not only did Tallulah want children, but she found the insecurity and the routine of an actor’s life sometimes all but unbearable. A few months earlier, she had written in the Sunday Express: “My greatest ambition always is to get a good play and then another good play and so on through the jolly years of life. The only other ambition I really have is to be free of ambition for to be ambitious is too exciting and harrowing for peaceful enjoyment.”