She informed Will that she was marrying on December 22 at the Re-gent’s Office “as you are not here to give me away.” But she promised a visit to the U.S. as soon as Cardboard Lover’s run was over. “Won’t it be fun. I can just see that precious Florence jumping all over the house with excitement.”
The Bankheads seem to have had no idea what Tallulah’s life in London was really like. Aunt Marie wrote to Will with evident sincerity: “I received your letter with the enclosure of Tallulah’s exuberant young love story and am delighted that the child is so happy in her engagement. Tallulah has not spread her affections so broadly and for that reason her love may be deep and lasting.”
Tallulah had written her father that Bosdari was “going in for politics next year. I think it best to keep it in the family.” Nevertheless, Marie was perturbed by statements Tallulah had given out suggesting that her retirement from the stage would not mean a spurning of public life. “My ambition is to reverse the performance of Lady Astor,” Tallulah said. “She is an American woman who got elected to the House of Commons. I will shortly become an Englishwoman through my marriage to Count de Bosardi. Then I will try to capture a seat in the American Congress. This will be possible because I retain my American citizenship rights.”
Tallulah would have to run against her own father in the House of Representatives, or against her uncle John for the Senate, since John was planning to run against the incumbent Senator Heflin in 1930. Marie wrote Will, “The newspapers seem to be pretty close on Tallulah’s heels and have cabled some rather silly stuff purporting to be an interview with her. I think it’s a good idea for all concerned for you to cable her and very gently admonish her against interviews.” Marie had been able to keep most reports out of the pages of the Montgomery Advertiser, where she had previously been on staff, but other papers were having a field day.
During the run of Her Cardboard Lover, Tallulah was reunited with Sara Mayfield, a childhood playmate from Montgomery. Mayfield was in London pursuing a degree in art history and had been given a letter of introduction to Leslie Howard. After a Wednesday matinee of Her Cardboard Lover, Mayfield was having tea with Howard in his dressing room when she heard Tallulah’s voice talking to Bertie Marr, Howard’s manager. From the hallway, Tallulah heard the mellifluous tones of another well-bred Southerner. “Oh, darling, where did you get that marvelous voice?” Tallulah asked as she swept into the room. “The same place you did, Tallulah,”
Mayfield replied, turning around to face her.
“Therefore she being a politician’s daughter embraced me and invited me to come to her house for cocktails next Sunday,” Mayfield subsequently wrote H. L. Mencken’s wife, Sara. “Tallu has wowed London,” Mayfield wrote Sara. “She is the toast of Mayfair. . . . more glamorous and gorgeous than Garbo will ever be offstage and certainly more amusing—one of the few genuine wits I know.” Mayfield and Tallulah went out together frequently. “The one adjective I know that describes Tallu best,” Mayfield recalled in 1971, “is great-hearted.”
Tallulah may already have had some second thoughts about Bosdari.
Mayfield wrote Sara Mencken that Tallulah was “so tentative” about the engagement “that I suspect there’s big game in the offing. . . . Even the Prago Wager—as the English call the Prince of Wales—is carried away with her.”
In 1971, Mayfield claimed to have known at first hand that Tallulah and the Prince of Wales did enjoy some type of relationship, just as Zit’s magazine had reported back in 1923. “Much to the amazement of the Court, he would take her dancing, and to the Savoy Grill, which was one of Tallulah’s favorite places. They were seen publicly not once, but often. I doubt that it went as far as an affair, but he was thoroughly infatuated with her and she was certainly ten times as charming as Wallis Warfield.”
At Christmas, Tallulah sent Will a telegram from Paris telling him that the wedding had been pushed back to January 19. She ignored two cables from him asking for an update. Tallulah and Bosardi went for a trip to Berlin, where Bosardi was “up to some hanky panky with UFA,” the German film company. During their stay Tallulah became convinced that “I was being used as a front, even a decoy,” to further deals in the entertainment industry that Bosardi was attempting to broker. She did agree, however, to film for UFA a short sound excerpt from Her Cardboard Lover that was distributed as a trailer to movie theaters. She learned that Bosardi had been married before, in the United States; the legality of the divorce he received there was questionable under United Kingdom statute.
Aunt Marie heard rumors of the broken engagement from a friend well before Tallulah was ready to inform her family or make a public announcement. Marie wrote on March 1 that “I think it was the best thing you could have done. . . . You have done so splendidly for yourself that there is no reason why you should marry unless you have every reasonable expectation of a happy union. . . . I know how independent you have been of all of your family and perhaps you never feel the need of any affection from them but in case you are ever in real distress of mind I trust that you would call upon me if I could be of any service to you. . . .”
In the spring, Tallulah went to Scotland to begin a tour of Her Cardboard Lover; there, “I broke all previous records,” she later wrote Will, “and surely have made for myself quite a new and large following.” John Perry saw her in Cardboard Lover on tour and said that the farce was made richer because Tallulah made clear how desperately vulnerable Simone was to the charms of her ex-husband. “She could be very moving,” he recalled.
Bosardi stayed in Germany. Tallulah finally phoned him from Scotland to tell him, “I can’t marry you, Tony. I don’t want to. Besides, it wouldn’t be legal.” Bosardi asked only that she not announce the news until he had clinched a certain deal. Tallulah agreed.
Her tour concluded, Tallulah went to the South of France to recuperate from the bewildering events of the past few months. She wrote her father upon her return and was forced to admit that her ambitious plans had foundered. “My darling Daddy you must think me awfully mean but I’ve meant to write you every day for months now, but things kept crowding in until I had so much to tell you that I didn’t know how to begin.” As always, she allowed Will only the most threadbare information about topics large and small in her life. “About the engagement I can tell you that in a nut-shell his American divorce is not legal in England.” That was all the explanation she was prepared to supply, but she made vague allusions to travel plans: “You may be seeing the prodigal child sooner than you think. I hope so. . . .”
There was news, too, of her revised appearance; Tallulah was much more forthcoming on that score than she was about Bosdari. She seemed to cope with her humiliation by reverting to an intensified focus on her looks.
After her holiday she was “very brown and sunburn and very much thin-ner. . . . I am letting my hair grow, am growing it off my face and behind my ears à la Greta Garbo.” She had apparently had the second of two operations designed to improve her nose, which was superb in profile but less so straight on. She told Will: “I’ve had my nose operated on again and it is now perfect, but don’t tell anyone as I don’t want it to get in the papers. It’s the same in profile but the bridge is narrower in front.” Before and after pictures were enclosed.
The day after writing Will, Tallulah began rehearsals for a new play, He’s Mine. This was an adaptation by Arthur Wimperis of Tu m’épouseras, a farce that had opened in Paris two years earlier, written by Louis Verneuil, a popular young playwright. (It had also been filmed in Hollywood in 1927 as Get Your Man starring Clara Bow.) A consortium of Americans, including Gilbert Miller, Herbert Clayton, and Jack Waller, was producing.
The direction of the play, too, was very much a collaborative effort, involving the talents of Wimperis, as well as stage manager Arthur Hammond, but most importantly, Sir Seymour Hicks. Hicks was one of the great comedians of the day, veteran of a long run of transplanted French farces, some of which he had translated. In his 1938 memoir, Ni
ght Lights, Hicks recalls Tallulah’s “hard work on the stage and her conscientiousness at rehearsals”during He’s Mine. “To regard her, as some still do, as a sort of gifted amateur, forced into the limelight and big parts by a strong personality and an exciting off-stage existence, is nonsense; and unfair nonsense at that.”
George Howe was summoned to read before Hicks and Tallulah for the juvenile lead, Étienne. When Howe appeared onstage at the St. James Theatre, “Oh, my God!” Tallulah gasped, finding him an unlikely juvenile because he was prematurely bald. There was no need to worry, he assured her, he donned a toupee onstage. Howe did get the job.
By this point, Tallulah’s need to expose herself had already become almost chronic. As much as a standard mode of seduction, it was a kind of reflex to cope with the rigors of social interaction, in which Tallulah, despite her impeccable Dixie training, became less at ease as her fame grew.
Darling was an endearment on everyone’s lips during the 1920s, but in 1962, Tallulah explained that it had become a habit for her not as an insistence on intimacy but because it allayed social anxiety. Her nudity also gave her a foolproof lever of control, but it also frequently destroyed the possibility of ordinary social exchange. And it became less and less volun-tary as the years went on. There was almost no one in Tallulah’s vicinity, no acquaintance of any length, who did not see her naked or at least very loosely covered. Her boundaryless interaction with those around her frequently merged into what can only be called socially aberrational behavior.
About a year after Glenn Anders had acted with Tallulah in 1926 in They Knew What They Wanted, he dropped in on her unannounced, immediately after arriving in London with a Columbia University fraternity brother named Tommy. As it turned out, Tallulah was having a quiet night at home reading in bed. Overjoyed to see Anders, she ordered her butler to open a bottle of champagne as she settled back into bed, beckoning Anders and his friend to sit close to her. “I just can’t wait to ask—oh, tell me about your mother?” Tallulah cried. “Is she still—For Christ sake I’ve got a piece of tissue paper in my ass! Throw that in the can, will you Tommy?”
Nothing so unnerving awaited Howe when, at the end of the first day’s rehearsal for He’s Mine, Tallulah invited him home for tea. They were alone and Tallulah was the perfect lady as she made tea, asked him about himself, and listened quietly. Howe was thus even more startled when Tallulah, whose chair was lower than his, put her leg up and allowed Howe untrammeled sight lines. He failed to evince any reaction, however, and Tallulah abandoned her jest, perhaps with relief. “I was shy of Tallulah,” he explained. “I wasn’t a very forthcoming, chatter-upper; I was a rather modest gentleman of the time. But Tallulah took you on your value, and because I didn’t make a pass at her, she quite respected me for that.”
Howe was born in South America and had various stories she wanted to hear. He would come to realize that Tallulah was interested in people who’d traveled and had a foreign, remote background. His father kept an apartment above Harrods department store in Knightsbridge, and Howe subsequently gave a party there for five or six members of the cast. Tallulah came, very intrigued about a private apartment above a department store.
Howe recalled her admiration for established actresses like Madge Titheradge, Sybil Thorndike, and Gladys Cooper. Two years earlier, Howe himself had acted with one of the most formidable doyennes in theatrical London, Dame Marie Tempest. During rehearsals for He’s Mine, he was thrilled to escort Tallulah to the opening night of Devil in Bronze at the Strand Theatre, starring Phyllis Neilson-Terry. Cheers went up from the gallery when Tallulah’s fans saw her. Settling into her seat, Tallulah received more applause than did the popular Neilson-Terry when she made her entrance onstage.
In He’s Mine, Tallulah played Wanda Myro, a secretary and the daughter of a Budapest shopkeeper. For two years she had been the mistress of a young nobleman, Maxim de la Bellencontre. Now he has dumped her because his family demands that he fulfill a long-arranged marriage contract.
Wanda arranges a sham car crash outside the Bellencontres’ Loire Valley château, where the family’s friend and permanent house guest the Marquis de Chantalard praises them for maintaining the old standards. “In these days of Bolshevism and Jazz, you’re the only man I know who stands like a rock for the old regime, and refuses to bow the knee to strange gods or to—er . . . er . . .” “Vulgarly speaking,” the duchess interjects, “to show the white feather to the Black Bottom.” But it soon becomes clear that hypocrisy is among the most hallowed “virtues” at the château. He’s Mine honored the venerable practices of French farce and took aim at the aristocracy and the church. The duchess has been secretly having an affair with the marquis for years. The marquis’s daughter, Simone, is Maxim’s intended, but she wants to marry his brother Étienne, who is headed for a seminary. Étienne’s piety is questionable, however; the moment he is alone with Victorine, the maid, he begins pawing her.
Wanda is a picaresque heroine, a working-class adventuress, but not a gold digger. She has never cashed the kiss-off check that the duke and duchess sent her. Carried into the château feigning unconsciousness, Wanda passes herself off as a Serbian princess. Within a few days she has utterly disarmed the household and is ready for Maxim, who is about to return home for his wedding. She bets him that in three days they will be engaged. He retorts that in three days she will have conceded defeat. “After my father, I shall become the head of the family,” Maxim tells her. “Yes, and I shall be the brains.” She knows she is best for him—“I am fighting for your happiness”—and so feels sanctioned to employ every possible ruse to win him back. Needless to say, by the fall of the third-act curtain, she and Maxim are to be married, as are Simone and Étienne.
Nearly every night after rehearsal, Arthur Wimperis; Helen Haye, who played the adulterous duchess; and Howe played bridge at Farm Street—a passion for the game had flared in Tallulah and would continue for the rest of her life. One night, while Tallulah was dummy, she disappeared and returned stark naked, running around the table, to the amusement of all present, although Haye put up a barrage of good-natured admonitions.
She was one of the most beautiful dowagers in the British theater and, although quite proper, had many lovers of her own.
Tallulah’s successful tour of Her Cardboard Lover earlier that year must have influenced her producers’ decision to break in He’s Mine with stops across Scotland and northern England. Tallulah traveled with her lover, Monica Morrice, who was boyish, amusing, and campy, one of many stagestruck socialites of the day. She was officially Tallulah’s understudy, but had neither aptitude for the stage nor any particular understanding of its customs. One night on tour, Tallulah was nowhere to be seen as curtain time approached. The management considered the possibility of putting Morrice onstage, but there was just one hitch: she had never bothered to learn the part. Fortunately, Tallulah arrived just minutes before the performance was to start. She apologized gaily to everyone present, and went to make herself up while the curtain was held for twenty minutes.
“She seemed to own the company,” Howe recalled, as if Tallulah were an actor-manageress in the tradition of du Maurier. She liked dining with members of the cast and invariably footed the bill. Over dinner, she enjoyed discussions about politics or the state of the poverty-stricken they saw as they toured. Somewhere on tour Michael Wardell also showed up.
Wardell was an executive in the Beaverbrook newspaper empire, and in her sporadic way, Tallulah had been involved with him for several years.
She also took a maternal interest in his son Simon, who was an elementary-school student.
As she boarded a train one morning during the tour, Tallulah announced to her colleagues, “Oh, darlings, I’ve been fucking all night!” Tallulah alternated, leaving Morrice furious in her bed while she trotted off in her nightgown to visit Wardell on another floor of the hotel. “Now, Tallulah,” Helen Haye chided once again, “you must remember to stay in your room; you can’t go wand
ering about the passages!”
Touring was still something of a novelty for her. As the company traveled farther north, it may have been difficult sometimes for their audience, steeped in burrs and brogues, to follow Tallulah’s transatlantic accent.
Howe somehow sensed that the audience of straitlaced burghers didn’t quite approve of her; despite her success on tour earlier that year in Her Cardboard Lover. He watched her work extra-hard to woo the audience.
She didn’t miss a beat if a laugh didn’t come, but then in the intermission, or after the final curtain, she frequently commented on what had worked or what hadn’t, and why, and discussed what she could try differently at the next performance.
As Cathleen Nesbitt had, Howe compared acting with Tallulah to the difficulty of playing with an actor who’s not really looking at you; by comparison, Tallulah “played completely with you.” In act 2 of He’s Mine, would-be seminarian Étienne’s fascination for Wanda leads him to sneak into her bedroom and hide in the closet to wait for her. The closet had a sliding door in back so that Howe could slip out until he was due to be discovered by Wanda. One night in Wales, however, the door jammed, and Howe was obligated to spend the balance of the act nearly asphyxiated by Tallulah’s beautiful costumes, steeped in the heavy floral perfume she used. In 1982 he could almost still smell them.
In Glasgow, Howe and several actors were visiting a golf club in the mornings. Tallulah would meet them for lunch, violating propriety by walking over the sacred green in high heels. At lunch in the club room, Haye would try fiercely to rein in Tallulah’s language, which horrified the old Scottish gentleman sitting around them. “Tallulah, shut up,” she’d whisper.
Howe could see that Tallulah had great respect for Haye’s talent and experience and might easily have consulted her about issues in the play.
Tallulah! Page 19