Wanger was married to Justine Johnstone, a World War I Zieg feld Follies beauty who had since begun medical school and eventually became a noted pathologist. But he was a ladies’ man who “had beady eyes for all the various stars,” recalled Sam Jaffe, who was then production manager at Paramount. Tallulah and Wanger were involved in London, and she was apt to be influenced by a bed partner. In any case, Wagner had a spectacular offer to make. Tallulah signed a multiple-option movie contract that would pay her an initial salary of $5,000 per week, rising to $8,000 should Paramount keep picking up her options. Neither Wanger nor Tallulah was evidently discouraged by the tepid response to His House in Order in 1928.
Her unusual voice would, of course, be adding an entirely new dimension to her film possibilities.
Tallulah wrote to her father: “I’ll have some interesting news for you in several weeks about my coming to America and talking films. Hollywood for me I’m afraid. I’ll be a bit nearer to my favorite man, Mr. Bankhead anyway. . . .” Tallulah seemed to still regard films with the condescension of the stage star, but it was Will who had been urging her years before to concentrate on film work.
Her Paramount commitment made, Tallulah seemed to lose interest in Let Us Be Gay. Toward the end of the run, she became “a frightful giggler,”Matheson recalled. “She would do terribly naughty things,” say lewd things behind her hand, her shoulders shaking with laughter at her own joke, turning her back to the audience so that they didn’t see. “The older actors were able to control themselves,” Matheson recalled, “and I think I learned how to, but she was awful.” Tallulah’s misbehavior led to the management’s posting calls for the entire cast to report for brushup rehearsals. She went under protest, grumbling about “too many calls, darling!” Crothers, who was in the best position to rein Tallulah in, had by this time returned to America. In Matheson’s scrapbook was a limerick written by a cast member including words to the effect that “Miss Bankhead thought extra calls were so much balls!”
As she prepared to return to America, Tallulah was deriving great satisfaction from the furor caused by the Royal Academy of Art’s decision to display a new portrait of her by Augustus John. He had painted her the previous fall in the pink lace peignoir she wore in act 2 of He’s Mine. She had been painted before in London, notably by the renowned society por-traitist Ambrose McEvoy. But John was different, a notorious bohemian with an altogether more intellectual cachet. Tallulah apparently could not resist the opportunity of becoming the great man’s muse in life as well as on canvas. John had written to her on May 12, 1930. “I am frightfully well now after a course of treatment and want to return to you before long like a giant refreshed. Are you working terribly hard? With love and admiration and gratitude.”
“Fresh from her bath and just a little bit rosy from hot water and indignation,” Tallulah discussed the portrait and its reception with a reporter from the Sunday Express. “Like it?” she asked, laughing. “Why I adore it!Say I’m absolutely crazy about it. They think it’s ugly, do they? Well it’s me.Yes it is. The real me. Perhaps they think I’m ugly. Some people do. They’re right. Some people think I’m beautiful. They’re right too. It’s a matter of taste.”
She had purchased it at great expense and was going to hang it “where everybody can see it. Anyway thank God it’s not like a bon-bon picture. It’s not like a chocolate box. It’s a great piece of art. . . . John is a great artist and when he paints he paints the essentials. He doesn’t try to just make a pretty picture that will look nice and dull and be incredibly unimportant, and I think . . . he’s put the essential me on the canvas and not just a little pink and white image of me like a lot of other things that are hanging around.”
Tallulah told herself that if Hollywood did not pan out she could easily return to London, but she committed herself seriously to the prospect of a new life. To prepare for the camera’s scrutiny, she intensified her dieting of the late 1920s. Her lifelong fight against the natural plumpness of the Bankhead women included potent laxatives and eventually amphetamines.
She sold the leasehold on 1 Farm Street and surrendered her Bentley.
She owed money all around London, including an arrears to the Inland Revenue Service. This must have been why just days after Let Us Be Gay closed on December 13, only a few weeks before she was due to leave England, Tallulah was not resting but instead opening at London’s Palladium music hall in a two-week run of a sketch called “Always Apologize.” Audry Carten had written it with her sister Waveney, and Tallulah had first performed it at a benefit in 1927. “Always Apologize” depicted a young wife’s hysteria when she believes her husband failed to place a bet on a Derby-winning horse. “It is all slight but noisy,” wrote the Times (London), “and Miss Bankhead is amusing in tirades, screeches, and gesticulations which the audience finds sufficiently entertaining.”
Tallulah wanted and expected that in Hollywood her star would graze Dietrich’s and Garbo’s. Hollywood stardom would represent the logical next phase in her relentless quest for acceptance and validation. In London a writer had told her that the adoration of Garbo issued from the lowest to the highest of social echelons. “That’s a most divine thing to have said of you,” Tallulah would later tell William H. McKegg of Picture Play. “If you can spread your appeal over so vast a range you have reached the top.” Determined to conquer new worlds, Tallulah left for Paramount’s studios in New York.
Part II
1931–1939
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Paramount
“I was completely unaware that I’d gotten frightfully British.”
On January 13, 1931, Tallulah disembarked in New York Harbor from the S.S. Acquitania. At the pier she was reunited with Will and her stepmother, Florence; she hadn’t seen either since her visit to the U.S. in 1925. Will’s love of politics consumed him— “Don’t let ambition kill you as it did Billy,” Florence warned Tallulah years later. Now he had aged considerably. Florence, who had a habit of getting carried away with herself, told Tallulah at the pier that she was too thin, and she was “a little hurt,”
Tallulah recalled, when Tallulah declined her stepmother’s request that she then and there recite a speech from Camille.
Tallulah checked into a suite at the Élysée Hotel on East Fifty-fourth Street, large enough to accommodate herself, secretary Edie Smith, and dresser Elizabeth Locke, whom she had brought from London. The press corps descended, and Tallulah was subjected to droves of interviews in which she dispensed refreshingly uninhibited patter. “Let’s be frank,” she told Frances Denton of Photoplay. “We’re all working for money. The legitimate stage is too uncertain.” She wanted a change from the nightly repetition of the theater. She was open to what the movies might do for her persona; asked about her preference in roles, she said she would “play anything.”
One week after her arrival, Tallulah was in harness at Paramount’s studios in Astoria, Queens. Closed since 1926, they had been reopened with the advent of talkies so that the mellifluous tones of Broadway actors could be more easily snared. “I was full of inhibitions and uncertainties,” she later recalled. “I knew nothing about making movies.” She had of course made half a dozen silent films, but she had never felt completely comfortable: “The camera coming up on me made me so nervous.” And 1928’s His House in Order had been the only feature film she’d made in a decade.
Moreover, the camera technique of early sound film was very different from what silents employed, and demanded far more restricted, static address to the camera.
She spent her first days making tests, and when she saw them she was appalled. “I sounded so affected,” she recalled in 1966. “I was completely unaware that I had gotten frightfully British.” She felt that she was too fre-netic. “On stage my whole point was my vitality, which if I showed it in pictures, looked as if I had St. Vitus’s dance.”
Now that Tallulah was stateside, Aunt Marie became something of a self-appointed surrogate mother to her. Marie also had her own son,
Thomas Jr., who was a few years older than Tallulah. Marie’s husband had died suddenly in 1920, after thirty years of marriage, and in 1938, she said that she was still adjusting to his death. Marie had been writing editorials and features for the women’s page of the Montgomery Advertiser. She took over her husband’s job as archivist of the state of Alabama, but she was under great stress because B. M. Miller, the new governor, was cutting the department’s financing.
“The whole of Alabama is watching your career with personal interest,” Marie wrote Tallulah on January 22. She told Tallulah that at a reception to honor the governor’s wife, each guest had been asked to give a brief talk about a prominent world figure. Four had chosen to speak of Tallulah:“ ‘Our Tallulah’ as they called you.”
As any mother might have done, Marie made demands of her own.
She began angling for some type of position in Tallulah’s entourage, as secretary or publicist. “I am sure you need no help as you have done everything for yourself alone but if you and your producers feel that I could be employed in any connection, I am at your service. . . .” That same day, Marie was writing Will about her proposal. “I would love very much to have a chance as I have been sitting here on this desk for eleven years and feel that I have only a little while left in this world and I have always wanted to be connected with the theatrical movement in some way.” Will seems to have purposely stayed out of it entirely. Tallulah returned Marie’s affection, but was careful to limit how much access or encouragement she gave her. Considering Tallulah’s lifestyle, it would have been intolerable to have any of her elders living with her permanently.
Marie also began a correspondence with a Mr. McCarthy, head of Paramount’s East Coast public relations. She sent him publicity ideas, and later that spring, he, too, received her request for a job. Marie certainly could have fulfilled a publicity position competently, since she was an able journalist who had also had a historical novel published in 1927. Paramount had nothing to offer her, however, but its representatives were unfailingly polite to her on Tallulah’s behalf.
Early in March, Marie conveyed to Will encouraging evidence that Tallulah was behaving herself. She wrote that McCarthy had informed her that Tallulah had “made a hit with all of those with whom she is working as she had tried to co-operate in every way possible. I thought this would gratify you.”
Dietrich was Paramount’s greatest star at the moment, and much of the studio’s prepremiere buildup hailed Tallulah as a second Dietrich. But Tarnished Lady actually bore little resemblance to the films that Dietrich was making. The setting was Park Avenue, which was hardly Dietrich’s turf. But it could just as well have been Mayfair—it is a drawing-room melodrama, a lot closer to Let Us Be Gay than to Dietrich’s Morocco.
Tarnished Lady was written by Donald Ogden Stewart, who had already distinguished himself both as playwright and screenwriter. The screenplay was based on Stewart’s short story “New York Lady,” an exploration of one of literature’s great themes: the maturation of a proud and privileged woman, whose character is immeasurably deepened by adversity. The milieu was genteel poverty on the lower tiers of high society. Tallulah played socialite Nancy Courtnay, forced to marry self-made tycoon Norman Cravath, redoubtably lockjawed Clive Brook, so that she can settle her family’s debts. She must give up DeWitt Taylor, the young artist she’s in love with. When her mother’s financial support is ensured by an inheritance, Nancy feels free to leave her husband, who is too proud to tell her that he has just suffered financial wipeout. To her chagrin, Nancy finds that her old flame is at that very moment entertaining her nemesis, Germaine, who earlier had her sights set on Norman. Nancy realizes her error, but even after discovering she’s pregnant by her husband, cannot bring herself to beg his forgiveness. Nancy supports herself and her baby son as a dress saleswoman. Germaine comes into her shop one day and tells her she is going to marry Norman when he has gotten his divorce. Later, realizing Norman still loves Nancy, Germaine bows out, and Norman and Nancy are reunited.
Tarnished Lady was released at the end of April. Tallulah watched the New York premiere from the executive offices on the balcony of the Rivoli Theater on Broadway. Publicist Louis Sobol walked in on her during the screening. “I can’t bear to watch it,” Tallulah whimpered. “I just can’t. I wish I could stop them. I should have stayed in London.” She recalled later that “I managed to get out of the theatre, blind with tears as I was.” She made her friends swear not to see the film, although she confessed she was pleased when Noël Coward said he liked her in it.
“A fine actress made her screen debut in a poor picture,” Regina Crewe reported in the New York American, sounding one of the critical notes that would recur for the balance of Tallulah’s stay at Paramount. Crewe described Tallulah as “an excellent technician, well poised, and possessing a certain glittering fascination. There is a tenseness in her acting and a power in her personality that succeed in gripping an audience and holding its undivided attention.”
Tarnished Lady was George Cukor’s first solo directing assignment.
There are moments that are distinctively his, such as the prolonged two-figure shot capturing the barely veiled hostility between saleswoman Nancy and customer Germaine. The talkies were fast becoming more fluid, more mobile, and less stage bound. But as a whole, Tarnished Lady is flat, especially in its final segments. We don’t understand Nancy’s sudden realization that she’s really in love with Norman, since they’ve never really had anything in common.
Tarnished Lady is no worse, however, than most of the productions in which Garbo, Joan Crawford, or Norma Shearer were starring, nor worse than most of what Paramount’s own Clara Bow, Claudette Colbert, Kay Francis, or Miriam Hopkins were making at the same time. This must be stressed, in light of the harsh dismissal Tallulah’s Paramount films have since received, often by writers who have obviously never seen them.
Dietrich’s films for von Sternberg at Paramount are of course in a class by themselves. They are frequently cumbersome and badly paced, flouting theatrical norms of logical narrative and characterization. What their endlessly shifting tableaux do provide is a spectacular excursion into a realm of uniquely cinematic possibilities. This was probably why they became among the first popular oeuvres to be canonized by academia with the rise of cinema studies in the late 1950s.
Watching Tarnished Lady today, the biggest surprise may be the discovery that weeks after leaving London, Tallulah’s acting skills were much more developed than what many of her London reviews suggest. She doesn’t overact either; in fact, Tallulah felt her attempt to modify herself had backfired. “In calming myself down I lost a certain naturalness,” she said in 1964, “part of my own personality which I had on the stage and which you either liked or disliked, but there it is, that is me.” But it is easy to disagree. There is no question that her theatrical allure never fully registered on film, but her ability to recognize the requirements of the medium is why her films are able today to refute the critical barbs she received.
But American audiences had a right to expect much more than what Tarnished Lady delivered. The public had been promised a breathtaking new star and subjected to an aggressive advance publicity campaign anticipating Tallulah’s debut. The juggernaut was so intense that the public’s skepticism could well have been aroused. A year later, Tallulah talked about the affront her arrival was said to have delivered to another screen goddess. “I was said to be trying to ‘do a Garbo.’ A fatal thing to say about anyone. Words perfectly calculated to arouse the defensiveness and rage of thousands of Garbo fans.”
Reviewing Tarnished Lady, The New Yorker’s critic displayed what seemed like resentment at being coerced. “She proves to be an ordinary young actress, suggesting mostly a feeble resemblance to the more beautiful and able ones, especially to Miss Dietrich. She fails in the end to establish any sort of identity of her own.”
Paramount was not discouraged. In 1931 the studio was riding high on Dietrich, the comedies of the M
arx Brothers, and the potboilers of DeMille. Tallulah’s option was picked up, and preparations began for her second movie.
Tallulah had invited Marie to visit her sometime in the fall if she was still in New York. Paramount was again shutting its Astoria studios to consolidate its production facilities in California. She apparently gave Marie some vague words of comfort about the prospect of employment. “You will never know how happy it made your old Aunt to realize that you had not entirely ignored her,” Marie wrote, “and the fact that you held out hope that you may be able to arrange something for me later on has given me new life.”
Marie’s aspirations extended to front as well as backstage. She informed Tallulah that she was acting the “heavy comedian” roles at Montgomery’s Little Theatre. “I would make Marie Dressler look to her laurels if they put me on the screen but I am not seeking that type of a job as it would be too ambitious an expectation.”
Tallulah followed that up with what Marie described in a letter of May 13, 1931, as “a generous check” that had rescued her from “my emergencies.” On June 19, Marie wrote an almost painfully honest and humble letter, apologizing for seeming “terribly unresponsive” during another phone call from Tallulah. Members of the family had been in the room and she could not speak freely because she hadn’t told them about her aspirations.
She also detected an unspoken message from Tallulah that “there was nothing doing” as far as a job with her was concerned. “This conviction sort of froze me over in addition to the situation of the audience.”
Tallulah! Page 22