Tallulah could also have benefited from the decades of wisdom and experience accumulated by Frederick Volpe, who played the marquis, and had acted with Tallulah in The Garden of Eden as Hugh Williams’s fussbudget uncle Herbert. Playing Maxim’s father in He’s Mine was Allen Aynesworth, a walking piece of theater history whose experience dated all the way back to the opening night of The Importance of Being Earnest in 1895.
Lawrence Anderson had been cast as Maxim. Anderson was related to Laurence Barrett and Mary Anderson, eminent tragedians of the nineteenth century. According to Howe, Anderson himself was “a rather solemn and traditional actor” without much comedy in him. Before He’s Mine opened in London on October 29, 1929, Anderson was replaced by Harry Kendal, a well-known young comedian with a touch of eccentricity that can be glimpsed pleasurably in Hitchcock’s Young and Strange.
“This far-fetched piece should obviously be played as a hurly-burly of outrageous farce,” James Agate wrote in the Sunday Times. Agate wanted the doors slammed with more force, pratfalls risked, the drawing-room floor scuffed with frantic footsteps. According to his critique, Aynesworth, Volpe, Howe, and Haye were “a quartet of players in the greatest reputation and accomplishment in pure comedy, none of whom, with the possible exception of Mr. Volpe, has ever had the faintest notion of making himself patently and fantastically ridiculous.”
As for Miss Tallulah Bankhead, I am compelled to say that after the first few moments she appeared to give up acting entirely and resign herself to abounding and splashing out in her own temperament. She gabbled through her part at terrific speed, and indeed it was so absurdly wordy that if she had not done so she would still have been acting half an hour after the rest of the cast had gone home. But the multitude of words, and the speed with which they must be delivered, made the performance as breathless as a Continental express two days behind its time.
Miss Bankhead has taught herself to be an extremely accomplished actress, and the most regrettable thing about the piece seemed to me that it tempted this good artist to forget all she has learned about her art.
But St. John Ervine reviewed the second night for the weekly Observer and felt that Tallulah had given “an uncommonly good performance,” that she and Aynesworth, “by sheer acting and facial expression, provoked the audience to the laughter which the lines attempted, but too often failed to rouse.”
Ervine had gone to the performance with the belief, derived from several reviews of the first night, “that Miss Bankhead would shout her way through the piece.” He found her instead
displaying abilities for comic acting and quiet effects that I ought to have known she possessed from my recollections of her work in “Fallen Angels” and “They Knew What They Wanted.” Miss Bankhead has not completely mastered herself. She has not learned the full value of repose, nor does she yet understand how to obtain the utmost effects from a line—I suggest to her that she should closely observe the work of Miss Helen Haye in this piece—but she has talents to develop, has, indeed, developed them considerably since her first appearance on the English stage.
Had Tallulah modified her performance after reading the opening night reviews, or is this just one more example of the divergent responses the same performance can evoke?
On the basis of its script, He’s Mine was rather more diverting than Her Cardboard Lover, but it lasted less than a month at the Lyric. However, He’s Mine was the occasion for a new candor.
Onstage, Tallulah expanded the boundaries of sexual equivocation as they were being expanded in society, at least in the fringes of a social and artistic elite. Amid this climate of ambiguity, it was now acceptable for Theatre World to hint at lesbian undercurrents in her audience: No criticism of Tallulah Bankhead’s plays is complete without reference to her displays of lingerie. Personally, I find her more attractive in a jumper-suit than without one, and I am quite willing to take her underclothes for granted. I am told, however, that these rather feeble attempts at immodesty are for the benefit of the feminine element of the audience. Well, well girls will be boys!
Constrained by Crinolines
“Whenever Tallulah moved or breathed there was chemistry flowing.”
— Actress Joan Matheson
She wanted to be a great actress,” Tallulah’s friend David Herbert recalled. “I think she was, myself. I felt it in my bones; she wanted to be even better than she was.” But Tallulah was subject to an equally compelling hunger for money, luxury, and stardom. These were not irreconcilable goals, but nevertheless required a very delicate balancing act that was increasingly undermined by the public persona she had created. When Estelle Winwood made a short visit to London in the late twenties, Tallulah complained—as she would do throughout the rest of her career—about the dearth of good roles that she was offered. “My dear Tallulah,” Winwood replied, “has it ever occurred to you that Cochran, Basil Dean and all the others are reluctant to engage you these days because of your reputation other than that of an actress?”
It’s unlikely that British producers were actually reluctant to hire Tallulah, although it is true that after 1928 almost all of her London plays were produced by Americans. Indeed, in London she had come to symbolize an American invasion of sorts at a time when “the Americanisation of the London stage is almost the sole topic of conversation,” Theatre World reported in 1928. But it is certainly likely that her private life had become too well known for her to be completely believable in a role that did not comport with her own notoriety.
It was probably financial considerations that brought Tallulah to the stage of London’s Palladium a few days after He’s Mine closed. Her appearance amid an assortment of magicians, song-and-dance teams, and tum-blers was not as unusual as it seems today. Many dramatic stars of the day toured the music halls of England and the vaudeville theaters of the United States. For her music hall debut, Tallulah had selected a sketch by Edwin Burke, entitled The Snob, in which she was a young wife whose husband will not recognize his illiterate bootlegger brother, and “by means of a trick,” The Stage explained, “exposes the snobbery of her husband.” The unsigned review reported that The Snob “shows off her own particular art to advantage, if it does not exactly overtax her talents,” and mentioned that “a funny little surprise at the finish gives an added touch to her performance.”
Tallulah’s success earned a second-week holdover at the Palladium.
Tallulah may have preferred comedy, but “like all comedians,” droll Gladys Henson remarked, Tallulah “longed to play Hamlet.” If not so far as Shakespeare, she nonetheless determined to range very far afield in her next stage appearance, choosing a revival of Alexandre Dumas fils’s 1849 La Dame aux Camélias, better known in English as Camille. Dumas’s first play was written when he was twenty-five. It was a dramatization of his own novel, written two years before, and based in part on his love affair with the courtesan Marie Duplessis. Dumas’s tale of Marguerite Gautier, the courtesan who tries to discard her past with a new life and younger lover, remained one of the great warhorses of the international repertory well into the twentieth century. Marguerite sacrifices her one chance at happiness at the urging of her lover Armand’s bourgeois father. The fallen woman accepted just enough punishment to make her acceptable as a heroine. (The play was nonetheless considered scandalous by many in Britain and the U.S.)
The mystique of the role must have attracted Tallulah, in part because it had been indispensable to the repertory of so many international stage stars. She could have seen in the martyrdom of Marguerite a precedent for roles like Iris March in The Green Hat. But her principal motivation seems to have been rebuttal. After Camille opened, she told Ward Morehouse of the New York Sun, “It’s been said that I only do plays in which I undress. . . . As a matter of fact, I’ve undressed in but two plays out of fifteen—The Garden of Eden and Her Cardboard Lover. Anyway, I decided to give them La Dame aux Camélias, and let them say I undress in that!”
In Camille she was again directed by Nigel Playfair. A young
actress named Joan Matheson, who had recently graduated from RADA, was making her West End debut playing Nichette, Marguerite’s loyal and innocent young friend. Matheson found Playfair’s stance as director extraordinary in its remoteness. “Looking like Queen Victoria,” Matheson said in 1982, Playfair sat in the stalls or in the box, very seldom venturing onto the stage.
“I think having got together what he thought was the right cast, he relied upon his little magic to work and blow it all together.” If so, this was a strategy that had served him in good stead in many of his revivals at the Lyric Hammersmith.
Having directed Tallulah in The Green Hat, Playfair must have assumed he would be able to handle her again. Yet while she “never complained during rehearsals,” Matheson said, “she went her own way. It’s as simple as that. She said, ‘Yes, yes, darling, of course, my love, of course dear,’ and then went straight away and did exactly what she thought she would do in the first place.” And in Matheson’s opinion, Tallulah’s whole approach and manner was too contemporary. “She had no sense of period,” Matheson complained.
Yet Tallulah later recalled that she felt straitjacketed by her attempt to conform to what she interpreted as proper period decorum. In 1938 she said: “I had a ghastly time trying to maneuver the old-fashioned costumes and make all the old-fashioned attitudes. I was perfectly miserable because I couldn’t cross my legs and slouch in a chair, and puff at a cigarette.” Her experience of the play, and perhaps the audience’s as well, suffered from her inability to suspend her own disbelief. “It just seemed phony to me.”
Where Tallulah shone was in the scenes of gaiety, and those establishing her camaraderie with her demimonde cronies. “She used the bawdy side of the part, and she felt happy with that,” Matheson recalled. “That was lovely. What she was lost in was this wonderful recovery, this return to days of refinement. I think she’d have been happier if the whole thing could have been coarser and more truthful. The way it’s always done is that she suddenly becomes pure and lovely, not a courtesan anymore.There’s this immense refinement.”
Another source of frustration was her leading man. Tallulah’s first choice for Armand had been Laurence Olivier. But he had just married actress Jill Esmond, whose mother, Eva Moore, had played in The Garden of Eden, and thereby been privy to Tallulah’s affair with Hugh Williams.
Moore as well as her daughter refused to let Olivier act opposite Tallulah.
Instead, Playfair hired Glen Byam Shaw, a good, honest actor who was just as handsome as Olivier. Between Shaw and Tallulah there was no special chemistry, Matheson said. Then she qualified that by adding, “Whenever Tallulah moved or breathed there was chemistry flowing. But Glen was holding out against it. She was way after him, and he was by no means interested.” Shaw had recently married Angela Baddeley, a lovely and accomplished young actress. Tallulah and he were cordial, but she was put out about not getting anywhere with him. It was not what we would today call sexual harassment, “it just wasn’t all the fun it could have been,” Matheson observed. Tallulah must have known that Shaw was not a stranger to contingent arrangements, having before his marriage been a lover of poet Siegfried Sassoon. “They were not together on stage and certainly not off,”
Matheson said. Yet Tallulah remained surrounded by admirers: “There was always somebody, something for her. You never knew whether it was going to be heterosexual or homosexual, and it really didn’t matter at all: she was full of warmth.”
Tallulah’s girlfriend Monica Morrice was still very much in the picture, playing a bit role in Camille. Although she and Tallulah ate supper in Tallulah’s dressing room after each performance, Morrice was not extended special privileges in the theater. She shared a room several flights up with three or four other women in the cast. One of them was Ellen Pollock, who in 1982 described Morrice as “a tiny little thing, flat as a board, with a very short gamine hairdo. Looked more like a boy than a girl, and acted like a young boy, always naked in the dressing room flying about, didn’t give a damn.”
At one point Morrice decided that her wig was appalling. Pollock expected that Morrice would go circumspectly to the stage manager, confess that it didn’t fit quite as it should, and ask if Playfair could possibly have a look at it. Instead, Morrice marched to the stage in her own customary trousers and strode to the footlights. Her wig perched on her head like a bird’s nest, she stood arms akimbo and greeted Playfair with a cheeky,
“Well, do I wear it?”
Morrice was informed that she would wear the wig and she obeyed.
“But the cheek of it!” Pollock exclaimed. “I couldn’t believe my eyes!
Everybody held their breath, they thought Nigel would blow up.” Pollock was nevertheless fond of Morrice and ventured to ask her why it was that she swore so unceasingly. “It’s my natural way of speaking. What do you mean?”
“I think it’s awfully ugly.”
“Is it?”
“Yes, to tell you the truth it gives me the shivers.”
The next day Morrice came in the dressing room and said, “Listen, everybody, nobody is to use any swearwords, do you mind? Because it’s jolly ugly, and Ellen doesn’t like it.” Morrice’s torrent of swearwords dried up from that point. “I was awfully impressed by that,” Pollock said. She found Tallulah’s language equally shocking, of course, although she never dared reprimand her.
Matheson was bewildered when Playfair made her Tallulah’s understudy, for in Matheson’s own opinion she could no more have reproduced Tallulah’s allure than the man in the moon. Tallulah came to an understudy rehearsal to watch Matheson go through the whole part. “Well done, darling!” Tallulah told her when it was over. “You beast to be here!” Matheson protested. “I could have killed her. She just laughed and went on.”
Camille opened at London’s Garrick Theatre on March 5. In the Sunday Express, the adoring Hannen Swaffer described Tallulah as “the most fascinating creature now acting on the London boards,” but nevertheless declared that she “would be better advised to stick to modern plays. She is a modern of the moderns. She is essentially a product of this age, which she reflects in every mood and tense, and in the deep pools of her beautiful eyes.”
Camille was performed in a new translation prepared by Playfair himself with Edith Reynolds. They had made some cuts in digressive discussions of Parisian topical events. But Playfair noted in an introduction to the published translation that “the words and directions of Dumas have been followed perhaps more faithfully than in any recent production, even in his own country.”
Probably this was a mistake. In 1936, Camille succeeded for Garbo on screen in part because it was entirely rewritten. If not brilliant, the screenplay is still a lot more fluid than Dumas’s original, which was certainly not, for the tastes of 1930, a vital script. “Marguerite becomes human when she ceases to orate (which is seldom),” noted the Times. For the first time in her life, Tallulah was delivering what the Times called “set speeches.” They were not rolling Elizabethan monologues, but rather long recitations that sometimes repeated, verbatim, the text of letters Marguerite has received. They discharged information rather than simulated conversation.
Tallulah altered her diction for Camille, dropping her colloquial delivery and adopting a more formal address. But she was certainly not at home in these recitations. The Times complained that these speeches were“marred by her tendency to begin each period loudly and instantly to lower her tone; the rhythm is wearisome and its regularity destructive of sense.”
Sometimes Marguerite voices her private thoughts, delivering asides to the audience that were accepted dramaturgy for centuries but were by now superannuated. “In these days of sophistication the ‘asides’ and soliloquies with which the play abounds appear ludicrous in the extreme,” D.C.F. reported in Theatre World. Ivor Brown in The Observer noticed that Tallulah was obviously frightened by them. They were certainly a drastic departure from the naturalistic dialogue she had delivered for most of her career.
Playfair’s concession to the tastes of a contemporary audience was his apparent interdiction of the emotional paroxysms with which earlier actresses had milked the play dry. Back in the 1890s, George Bernard Shaw had written that the emotional displays exploited in Camille were “not fun-damentally distinguishable from that offered by a public execution or any other evil in which we still take a hideous delight.” The Era’s critic confessed his surprise at finding:in place of the high colored and feverish affair which we had expected, a play of half-tones and mild plaintiveness. Just a series of pretty pictures and dresses in Sir Nigel Playfair’s well-known Hammersmith manner. . . . We left the theatre feeling that there is only one way to play “The Lady of the Camellias” and that is the old way. Bring anything savouring of the precious near it, and each shows up the absurdities of the other.
Instead of the flood of congratulations a success elicits, after the reviews appeared “we all kept away,” Pollock recalled, “it was so embarrassing.” Tallulah gave her reviews an offhand dismissal, but her behavior showed that she was demoralized. In the wings she was tense, sometimes shaky. “She wouldn’t want anybody near her at all,” Pollock recalled.
Sometimes she was not in the wings when she should have been. Her cue would be sounded, and she wouldn’t come immediately, so onstage there’d be a few seconds of panic until she arrived.” “She could shatter you a little bit,” Matheson recalled. “In fact, you didn’t quite know where you stood with her—ever.”
Matheson felt sure that Tallulah herself was more aware than anyone of her own inadequacies in Camille. “She really didn’t like herself in the play, and she was fighting against it. I felt this terrific vitality being crushed by the fact that she knew she’d made a mistake.”
After one Saturday-night performance Tallulah headed for a weekend in Paris. But when Monday night rolled around, she was nowhere to be seen. The possibility of putting Matheson on could not even be broached because Matheson’s own understudy for the part of Nichette had lost her voice. The performance was canceled and the audience’s tickets refunded.
Tallulah! Page 20