Tallulah appeared Tuesday night and sent apologies to the cast via the call-boy. “We were all very shocked,” Pollock recalled. “In all my long career I never remember anything at all like that.”
Tallulah’s Camille seemed to be beset by more than its share of mishaps. At one performance, she had finished her death scene and the curtain descended only to rise up again instantly. The audience saw Tallulah walking offstage breezily, her crinolines gathered around her waist. On another occasion, the fourth-act curtain did not fall as scheduled on the final crescendo of Tallulah as Camille, her current protector D’Varville and the scorned Armand at loggerheads with each other. The actors had no choice but to continue the scene as D’Varville’s threatened slap across Marguerite’s face became a reality. Tallulah responded with a retaliatory slap.
The charade seemed to the cast to last an eternity, as it was forced to keep simulating appropriate reactions of shock and distress. When the curtain finally came down, Tallulah was livid. The stagehand responsible “was in terror of his life.” Backstage echoed and reechoed with her expostulations.
“Finally,” recalled Matheson, “this was typical of Tallulah—having blasted him to hell, she finally sent for him, and got him stinking drunk to cheer him up, after having nearly finished him.”
Pollock had given birth a few months before Camille opened, and she kept her infant son in a basket in her dressing room, breast feeding him during the intermissions. “Bring that baby down. I like that baby,” Tallulah said, and sometimes asked if Pollock would let him stay with her alone while she made up. Tallulah asked Pollock and her baby to a cocktail party she was hosting for a few guests.
Camille lasted only two months in London, but Tallulah’s popularity in the English provinces warranted a tour, where yet another onstage calamity occurred. A modernized set had been built for the tour, substituting levers inside the stage for the system of ropes and pulleys that manipulated scenery. A veteran stagehand was still a bit baffled by the new apparatus and sat down accidentally on one of the levers. Tallulah and Matheson were seated in the garden for act 3. Tallulah was extolling the virtues of country life when, with a terrible clang, all the pillars shot up into the air and rocked backward and forward. Matheson was paralyzed, determined to continue with the play at all costs and behave as if nothing had happened. “But this is when Tallulah took charge. She knew what to do. She just fell about with laughter. The audience laughed, she laughed, I laughed.” The pillars came back into place, “and she picked it up, got everybody back into the scene.” This stagehand was more fortunate than the previous malefactor: Tallulah had laughed all her irritation out of her system.
London Farewell
“She does all the right things in the wrong way, or all the wrong things in the right way.”
— Playwright St. John Ervine
As she began rehearsing Rachel Crothers’s Let Us Be Gay in July 1930, Tallulah had no idea that this would be the last time she would act on the London stage. Earlier in the year she had told Ward Morehouse of the New York Sun that she would love to act in New York again. “But I live here, you see. . . . London’s my home. . . . I have servants. . . . It would be trouble, great trouble, to pick up and go to America for any lengthy stay. But I could go over and make a talkie and come right back. That I’d like to do.”
Two seasons earlier, Let Us Be Gay had been a hit on Broadway starring Francine Larrimore; Tallulah was pleased to be succeeding the actress she had supported in Nice People nine years earlier. In her fourth and last appearance in a play by Crothers, Tallulah was on territory both familiar and unexplored. Let Us Be Gay returned her to the contemporary setting to which she was best suited. At the same time she acquired a new element of maturity, playing for the first time a mother and a divorcée.
In the prologue, we meet Kitty Brown, a young California matron, devastated by the discovery of her husband’s infidelity and telling him tearfully that she is determined to divorce. Act 1 opens three years later, in the East Coast country house of a grande dame, Mrs. Boucicault, who has met Kitty in Paris. Mrs. Boucicault has summoned her for an urgent mission. She wants Kitty to lure a houseguest away from her granddaughter, Dierdre, who has fallen for him despite being engaged to another, more suitable young man. Kitty’s prey turns out to be her own ex-husband, Bob Brown.
Bob spends the next two acts trying to persuade her to take him back.
Let Us Be Gay is a classic comédie à tiroir, in which drawers open and subplots spill out. At Mrs. Boucicault’s, a constellation of available men is each fascinated by Kitty. One of them, writer Wallace Grainger, is there with his married mistress, Madge Livingston, who justifies their affair on the basis of the artistic inspiration she supplies him. But his talents are flagging and she is struggling to puzzle out her role in his decline.
It is the themes of Let Us Be Gay rather than its plot that provide a telling time capsule of cultural anthropology. We are confronted with women’s changing roles in a world that has been radically remade. The Kitty Brown we meet in act 1 is a different woman from the injured innocent of the prologue. She has acquired seasoning and sophistication, and easily sports a charming and blasé facade. She is now working, designing clothes. Sexual freedom and economic independence go hand in hand.
Mrs. Boucicault asks her when she will marry again and Kitty tells her never: “When I’m paying my own bills—men may come and men may go.”
“Like you,” Kitty tells Bob, “I’ve been amusing myself with anything and everything that came my way. I know how a man feels about that too.”
Helen Haye was the perfect choice to play Mrs. Boucicault, who is in some ways the most interesting character in the play. “Women are getting everything they think they want now,” she declares, “but are they any happier than when they used to stay at home—with their romantic illusions—and let men fool them?” She is not a voice of reaction; she is genuinely curious. “I always knew that my husband wasn’t faithful to me, but I lived in hell with him for fifty years because divorce wasn’t respectable.” Her own daughter has been divorced three times, and Mrs. Boucicault approves. “I’d like to live another fifty years—without the bother of living—to see this thing through. . . . I’m seventy-six, and I don’t know anything.”
During Let Us Be Gay, we see both Kitty and her ex-husband, Bob, put on and discard various masks. Kitty insists that Bob conceal their former relationship. When the other guests are present they talk to each other with studied impersonality, their words freighted with coded meanings.
But when they are alone they talk as intimates. In the final seconds of the play, Kitty’s private mask seems to crack completely as she capitulates to Bob’s plea that they reunite. “I’ve been so gay,” she confesses, “so—so full of—so empty.”
Her turnaround is too abrupt; Crothers rings down the curtain too soon. We aren’t given time to speculate on how their inevitable remarriage will compare to their first. We feel better for knowing that Kitty has finally, at least privately, dropped her defenses, thus revealing the soul behind the facade. But the identity she has developed since her divorce has improved her in many ways. Today’s audiences would not want to see her sacrifice her hard-won autonomy. Crothers leaves unresolved the issue of whether Kitty’s newly exposed vulnerability will preclude her independence. Most importantly: Will she keep her job?
Playing Dierdre, Joan Matheson was working again with Tallulah, this time in a far more difficult role. Nichette in Camille is, as Matheson said, “a lovely little part; the sympathy was there all the way.” But plunged into Crothers’s drawing room repartee, “I could do everything wrong.” Dierdre, too, is masked: a young girl in over her head, pretending to be worldly. It was a wonderful part, but quite difficult, Matheson said, because “the young girl playing her had to more or less observe herself. She had to be adult enough to know how a childish person would appear trying to be more grown up than she was—and making a complete fool of herself.” Act 2, scene 1 shows
an increasingly drunken and distraught Dierdre railing against her grandmother’s intrigues. In scene 2, she discovers that Kitty and Bob’s rooms are adjacent and accuses them of cavorting under her grandmother’s roof. In act 3, she is left in limbo when she learns the truth about Kitty and Bob’s common past.
Before rehearsals began, Tallulah summoned Matheson several times to Farm Street to work on their scenes together. It was always around noon, and Tallulah was to be found in her bath, evidently recovering from a slight hangover. Matheson sat near the tub, and Tallulah gave her tips as they read the lines.
Kitty was a character with whom Tallulah could have almost instinctively identified. For Tallulah’s facade, like Kitty’s, protected and simplified her. “She was intelligently interested in all sorts of things,” Matheson recalled. “She read all sorts of things: biographies, history. Only you wouldn’t have known it from just talking to her. Her general conversation was tremendously light and bubbling. It was laughter. But you’d see books around and occasionally she would let something out.”
As always, Crothers was directing her own script. Tallulah now finally explained to her that it was fear of offending Alington that had prevented her from delivering her “kings and queens” line in Everyday in 1921.
Crothers chided her for not confiding earlier. They were certainly on good terms, but Matheson claimed that “even Tallulah, like the rest of the cast, got fed to the teeth with Rachel because she was the kind of director that had to push and nag. She couldn’t help, she couldn’t ease it in—it had to be ‘like that’ or not at all.”
Matheson found her booming interjections very trying. “C’mon, darling, give,” Crothers urged her. “We want more out of you!” Matheson complained about “this terrible voice going ‘aaawn,’ one of those awful”—Midwest American—“voices. It rang in my head all night.”
Tallulah would whisper a reminder to Matheson to “wait for the laugh,” or tell her, “Don’t worry, darling. Just get a bit more speed on it.
Don’t hang around.” (“Young people always tend to dwell very hard on it,”said Matheson, “drag it out, make the most of it—milk it, in fact.”) During one rehearsal Matheson burst into tears and dashed blindly offstage. “If I could have gone into the street, I would have and never gone back.” She found herself in the gallery being mopped up by Tallulah, who ordered her to “get back down there!”
“I went back, ’cause she made me,” Matheson said. “I wouldn’t have otherwise, not for anything in the world.” “You’ve broken,” Tallulah told her, “and now you’ll be all right.” Tallulah “totally forgot she was the star,”
Matheson recalled gratefully. “Anyone else might have said, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, call me when this stupid child has either come back or not.’ ”
Crothers never went at Matheson again. “Well, now we’ve busted it,”the playwright announced. “Now we’ve got something; we’ve got something at laaast.”
Let Us Be Gay opened in Birmingham on August 4, 1930, “The acting is capital throughout,” reported The Stage’s correspondent. “Miss Tallulah Bankhead has a part which eminently suits her distinctive style, and her talents have full play. She acts with finish and understanding, always with sincerity in the graver moments and in other scenes with a fine touch of comedy.”
When the play reached London’s Lyric Theatre on August 18, Tallulah was “fighting a gallant battle against the silly Tallulah worship,” Hannen Swaffer reported in the Sunday Express. The rise of the prologue curtain found Tallulah sitting on a bed, sobbing out Kitty Brown’s betrayal. “The staggering novelty” of the bedroom setting, “which cannot have been seen since Tallulah’s last play, caused a hurricane of applause from excited females in the gallery. I guessed why they were nearly paralyzed by their frenzy. Tallulah was in no way undressed! Perhaps they could not believe it! They yelled and screamed. Meanwhile Tallulah hid her face, nervously waiting for a chance to speak. For nearly a minute the screams went on, while I heard the voices of men upstairs, imploring to throw somebody else out.”
The Stage’s London reviewer called the play an “essentially artificial and unreal comedy,” but was pleased to discover that Tallulah revealed moods of “passion and emotion hitherto unexplored.” In the Evening Standard, Edith Shackleton alluded to the need of Tallulah’s fans to pretend that her stage persona did no more than replicate her own life: “It is held by a few of her most fervent admirers that Miss Tallulah Bankhead never acts, but last night she was doing something so like it that the difference does not matter.”
As Shackleton suggested, the gallery had become an albatross, and by now Tallulah at least to some degree realized that. “She didn’t give a hoot for them, really,” said Gladys Henson. “She was flattered by their attentions but she was a bit bored with them, really, ’cause they are boring.”
“It is not Tallulah’s fault,” Swaffer wrote. “She works hard and she really tries. She has more ‘personality’ than any other girl on the stage. . . .They do not give Tallulah a chance.”
An unidentified clipping pasted in Matheson’s scrapbook raised a battery of red flags: “Miss Bankhead romped through this boomerang romance with enough spirit for half a dozen plays,” one reviewer wrote. “Her vitality, indeed, is her greatest asset. I’ve never seen an actress of Miss Bankhead’s eminence with less technique.” Her alleged lack of “technique”is one of the most common shibboleths leveled at Tallulah, and the accusation is often flung indiscriminately without clarifying what technique actually means.
Matheson felt that the reviewer was confusing technique with style.
Tallulah’s British colleagues were playing in a recognized and familiar style, employing ways of moving, of behaving, of reacting that Matheson regarded as already codified. Tallulah had her own ways. “There was certainly nothing accepted about her: she didn’t make any of the accepted movements,” Matheson said. “We had a way of coming to the door; well if Tallulah wanted to, she’d come through the door backstairs. She didn’t use the sort of technique that we were expecting from Marie Tempest or Gladys Cooper.”
For Matheson, technique refers to the craft of handling oneself onstage, “being able to present yourself so you’re heard and seen and your points come over.” Here Tallulah showed undoubted adeptness. “She knew how to project; she knew how to control her audience. Of course she had technique.”
For the British, technique may be synonymous with restraint. Compared with Americans, “I think the British thought they were pretty much better actors,” The Dancers’ Una Venning said, “mainly because they were so much more subtle and controlled.” In the same vein, “Sir Topaz,” the droll drama critic for the weekly pictorial Eve, wrote after Blackmail that Tallulah could be counted upon to “discharge more emotion and give more of herself in one undisciplined half-minute than almost any English actress can contrive in three acts of polite disturbance.”
Playwright and sometime critic St. John Ervine invariably praised Tallulah in his reviews, yet in a profile for the New York World in September 1928, he wrote that she “contrives to make a show during performance, and she makes it by throwing technique to the winds and going all out for a wild-storm-at-sea effect.” Unquestionably this itself is also a technique, simply not one perhaps that Ervine felt comfortable with. He wrote that“She reverses the established canon of acting, that an actor gains control of his audience by keeping control of himself, for she gains control of her audience by losing control of herself.” But did she lose control of herself or did she simulate losing control? Not having acted onstage with Tallulah, Ervine might not have been in the best position to know. “She does all the right things in the wrong way, or does all the wrong things in the right way.” No matter what he thought of the means, the effectiveness of the end could not be denied. “Whatever the way in which she does them may be, she seizes and holds and keeps her audience,” which one could well argue is or should be the primary goal of any acting technique.
Technique
is also defined as the ability to maintain consistency in a performance over the course of a play’s run. Barbara Dillon from The Green Hat said she thought that Tallulah had “magnificent instinct. But I don’t think she’d been on the stage long enough, then, to have developed a technique which could have been employed on its own. It takes years of experience for a great star to be able, even if they are right off color, to fall back on their perfect technique. I think she was more dependent on mood. She was very young, remember.” And on this score, it may be said that Tallulah never reached technical perfection.
After performances of Let Us Be Gay, Tallulah entertained in her dressing room until the stage doorkeeper was begging to be allowed to go home.
“And the drink would flow then,” Matheson recalled. Tallulah, however, forbade drinking among the younger members of the cast, who frequently were invited with her to parties. Michael Wardell gave one at his house in Mayfair, where Tallulah and the Marx Brothers took turns reciting Shakespeare. The parties would still be at their peak when Tallulah would shoo out her junior colleagues: “Go on, darlings, you’re all going home now, out you go.” She instructed her chauffeur to drive each one of them home in her green-and-cream Bentley.
Passing through London was Walter Wanger, an independent producer at Paramount Pictures. Wanger was just the man to persuade Tallulah to commit herself to a future in films. He did not spend most of his time in Hollywood and he was not the prototypical Hollywood fast-talker, but “a very sophisticated man of the world and New York character,” Douglas Fairbanks Jr. recalled in 1992. Wanger had been an ace aviator in World War I, then an aide to President Wilson at the Versailles Conference. He very quickly became one of the most powerful producers at Paramount, Valentino’s The Sheik one of his first great successes. Wanger was “always a profligate spender of his own and the other fellow’s fortune,” screenwriter Frances Marion recalled in her 1972 autobiography. “His bravado either attracted or repelled those whose lives he touched.”
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