Tallulah!

by Joel Lobenthal

  Tallulah had told her she did not want to leave New York. “But with your whole hearted devotion to your business,” Marie assured her, “you will be too occupied to grieve for absent friends. It will be an interesting and novel experience for you and this will compensate for other things.”

  But Marie was going to visit Tallulah in New York before she left for Hollywood. She also had a new idea about how Tallulah could help her, a way perhaps of covering her pride. “I feel that you are the life line that can be thrown out to me in the way of getting someone interested in the two moving pictures ideas which I have. . . .” Marie did come to New York that July. “I miss your motherly presence in the apartment,” Edie wrote her after Marie had returned home. Tallulah must have made some inquiries on her behalf, for Marie would continue to send her scripts over the next decade.

  Discussing Tarnished Lady a month after the premiere, Tallulah had told the Herald Tribune, “I think perhaps our trouble was that all of us connected with it were stage people, instead of picture people. . . . Next time it may be better if I have some old veteran to show me the tricks.” But George Abbott, who directed her next two films, was a theatrical polymath—actor, writer, and director—who was relatively inexperienced in film. He signed to direct for Paramount in 1929, but film was not his medium and not one for which he had great enthusiasm or aptitude.

  Tallulah “was self-consciously eccentric,” Abbott said in 1982. She would sit on his lap and confide, “I want ’em all to think I’m your lover.”

  But on another occasion she said to him, “I never could fall in love with you. You’re too reliable. I have to have a cad, so I don’t know where he is at night.” Nevertheless, “we got along perfectly,” Abbott said. “I can’t remember any trouble.”

  My Sin, Tallulah’s second film, was written by two successful and experienced drama smiths, Adelaide Heilbron and Owen Davis. In the opening scenes, Tallulah appears deeply entrenched in classic Dietrich territory.

  She is a cabaret singer in Panama, whose no-account husband had married her in the United States, brought her to the tropics, and “then drove her down and down and down.” We see her first in the cabaret, singing, carousing, but spooked by persistent peripheral visions of her husband.

  What she thinks is a phantom becomes real back in her digs, where he appears intent on stealing the savings she’s stashed to return home. Their struggle over a pistol leaves him dead.

  Fredric March is Dick Grady, a lawyer on the skids who dries out so that he can defend her. She is acquitted but nonetheless attempts suicide.

  Grady stops her, and encourages her to go back to the U.S. and construct an entirely new identity. The next time we see her, she’s a successful New York interior decorator going by the name of Ann Trevor, and is soon to be engaged to one of her clients. When Grady appears in New York she doesn’t realize at first that he’s really the man for her. But when a government official recognizes her and tricks her into confessing her past, society marriage becomes, of course, out of the question. She is left free to settle down with Grady.

  During the filming of My Sin, Mrs. Locke left for a visit to England that she imagined would take no more than a few weeks. She had recently undergone an operation and her health was still poor. Moreover, her daughter had remained in England and she had family matters to take care of. Before she left she wrote Will thanking him for helping to secure her reentry permit: “I want to take this opportunity to tell you what a joy it has been to me all these years to be with your dear daughter, who has been almost like a child to me. . . .” Will fretted that Tallulah would die a pauper, and Mrs.Locke was eager to reassure him about the state of her finances. “I thought you would be interested to know that she is saving her money and already has invested in a Trust Fund for $30,000. She owes no bills anywhere and everything is straightforward for her to go ahead now to make a lot of money.”

  Tallulah’s family very much wanted her to visit home, but instead she used her vacation to take a trip out west with a new girlfriend, actress and socialite Hope Williams. Williams boasted a mannish beauty and a tomboyish charm, a lovely voice, and a sufficient amount of acting ability.

  In Philip Barry’s Paris Bound in 1927, she clumped across the stage incongruously clothed in a frilly white dress. Tallulah’s friend Ruth Hammond was in the audience, and she recalled in 1991 that she as well as the rest of the audience wasn’t quite sure what had hit them, but they were entranced by the certain prospect that here was a novel type. Williams’s success announced a new rapprochement between New York high society and the entertainment business.

  Upon her arrival from London, “Tallulah found that all the top-drawer lesbians—social ones—were making a play for Hope,” Ann Andrews recalled. “Well, that’s all Tallulah needed, ’cause she had a great sense of ‘I want to be the boss of everything!’ And so, my dear, all she had to do was be charming and that led to quite a long affair.”

  But more than conquest probably motivated Tallulah. Williams was“sharp as a tack,” socialite Joseph O’Donohue recalled in 1993, “well-read, beautifully brought up, came from a good family, very good looking: everything a high-class lesbian would want to have.” Williams was also a shrewd businesswoman who owned a commercial dude ranch in Wyoming. In between finishing My Sin and beginning her next film, Tallulah and Williams spent a couple of weeks in Wyoming.

  Tallulah was back in New York by the time My Sin opened in New York on September 11, 1931. Film Daily said it “offers additional evidence to the effect that Miss Bankhead is first class starring material.” But again she failed to ignite the box office. Yet she distinguished herself in a role that was notably second-rate. In the Panama scenes she demonstrates a neurotic edge that is entirely different from Dietrich’s behavior in similar stories and locale. Tallulah and March are a magnetic couple. Next to him she looks even smaller than she was, and thus particularly vulnerable. With Lily Cahil, who plays Tallulah’s boss in the interior decorating business, Tallulah demonstrates an appealing female camaraderie. The cinematography is better than it was in Tarnished Lady. Photographer George Folsey had more experience with talkies than did Larry Williams, who had worked for Cukor. (Folsey was eventually to reap thirteen Oscar nominations.) A month after My Sin opened, Will made the mistake of letting Marie know that Mrs. Locke had decided not to come back to the U.S. after all.

  Marie proposed herself as Mrs. Locke’s replacement, adding that a position with Tallulah would also give her opportunity to study the technique of screenplay writing. Tallulah telegrammed Marie her regrets that she couldn’t“MAKE ANY ARRANGEMENTS ABOUT YOU. . . . PARAMOUNT HAVE ENGAGED A MANAGER FOR ME THAT IS WHY MRS LOCKE IS NOT COMING BACK.”

  In Hollywood, Tallulah herself did engage an agent to negotiate with Paramount on her behalf, but he was surely not performing the same duties that Mrs. Locke had. Marie immediately telegrammed her regrets and then changed the subject.

  Customarily distant yet cordial with her family, Tallulah did genuinely enjoy spending short periods of time with them. Eugenia Bankhead was in New York that fall, and the two sisters, now reconciled after their breach in 1928, got along famously. Two factors ensured harmony: they lived separately, and Tallulah picked up all the tabs. “Perhaps I shouldn’t say that,” Edie reported to Marie, “but Miss Tallulah loves doing it anyway.”

  Eugenia was a voracious reader who spoke several languages, but could not or would not work. She spent a great deal of her life in mad pursuit of love, sex, and funding. Her greatest torment was not being able to have children. A minor operation when she was twenty had resulted in septicemia, which rendered her infertile.

  After New York, Eugenia returned to Europe, where a friend of Marie’s ran into her at the Paris Ritz. Marie suggested that Eugenia might be pursuing yet another reunion with her ex-husband Milton Hoyt. Eugenia had told Marie’s friend that Hoyt had been in Paris but had left the day she arrived. “Of course I do not know how true this may have been as Eugenia has a good i
magination. She also told a party who she met on the ship that she had lost three beautiful children. Dear child, I think all of her unnatural behavior is due to her mother frustration.”

  George Abbott again directed Tallulah in her next film, The Cheat, which had first been filmed by Cecil B. DeMille as a silent in 1915 starring Sessue Hayakawa, then in 1923 as a silent vehicle for Pola Negri. Tallulah was Elsa Carlyle, a Long Island matron with an uncontrollable urge to live on the razor’s edge. Elsa tries to recoup her gambling losses by investing the takings from a charity bazaar. When her investment tanks she accepts money from a mysterious playboy, Handy Livingston, just returned from the East, played by Irving Pichel. Elsa’s husband suddenly announces that a deal he’s been brokering has succeeded, and Elsa is able to return the money to Livingston. But that’s not the payback he was envisioning. When she balks, he brands her shoulder with an iron imprinted with an Asian symbol for I Possess. (Earlier he had shown her a collection of dolls, each representing women in his past and each similarly stamped.) Elsa retaliates with a gunshot that only hits Livingston’s shoulder. Her husband insists that she let him take the rap, but during the subsequent trial Elsa leaps to her feet and denounces Livingston. The court finds branding sufficient exoneration for attempted murder, and by the final fade-out we believe that Elsa has learned her lesson.

  Abbott relinquished directorial duties midway during the production after his wife became ill, and so we do not know how much he contributed to The Cheat. It is not a bad film, although the postbranding sequences feel anticlimactic. Like so many of the early talkies, it is very short, but unlike so many of them its sixty-five minutes don’t seem overly crowded with incident.

  Folsey was again behind the camera, and cinematographically, The Cheat is more elaborate than either Tarnished Lady or My Sin. Tallulah takes to the dunes to brood over her gambling flameout, her lamé gown aglow against the night. Livingston catches up to her and she accepts his invitation to motor over to his mansion for a tour. When they return to the yacht club, they meet her husband. Tallulah’s hair blowing in the ocean breeze supplies a humanizing contrast to her usually immaculate coif. “You know, darling, I am mad!” she tells her husband. “Mad about living, things going round, I love them. Ferris wheels. Train wheels. Roulette wheels!”

  Tallulah’s husband is played by Harvey Stephens, an unexceptional actor who nonetheless radiates a boyish, almost gauche sincerity; he is a convincing foil for Tallulah’s combination of nervous intensity, swagger, melancholy, and languor. Theirs is a convincing marriage of opposites.

  Unlike her first two Paramount projects, The Cheat’s production values are deluxe. Pichel lives in a mansion that is a veritable cornucopia of Eastern delights, replete with gamelan players in residence. He loans his house to the Milk Fund for its annual ball, where Balinese dancers snake through the house as Elsa learns that she has lost her money. The Cheat’s visual gloss is not quite in the MGM class, but it is strongly reminiscent of Garbo’s 1929 Wild Orchids, in which Garbo’s Western wife is also lured into an Eastern playground. In both films, the married heroine risks compromising her moral integrity when she accepts the gift of a jeweled gown from an Eastern admirer. In The Cheat, Pichel insists Tallulah wear a resplendent jeweled gown, which he’s brought back from the East, to the Milk Fund ball.

  Tallulah was just arriving in Hollywood when The Cheat opened on December 11, 1931. The New York Times said that “Miss Bankhead, who has been somewhat unfortunate with her previous screen vehicles, at last appears in one that really merits attention,” and noticed the improvement in the way she was photographed. But The Cheat fared no better than Tallulah’s first two vehicles, although it is likely that Paramount recouped money in England. Each of her movies was seen there as soon as it opened in the U.S.

  Edie wrote Marie: “It’s a great pity ‘The Cheat’ didn’t come up to expectation but Paramount realize [sic] what a star they have in Miss Tallulah and say they are determined to get her a good story next time.”

  Hollywood

  “I think I am simply awful-looking . . . on the screen, unnatural, awkward, graceless. I never get used to myself. . . .”

  Tallulah arrived in Hollywood in the late fall of 1931 not quite at the pinnacle of her profession, in a town where you were only as good as the grosses on your last movie. Nevertheless, she made sure that she was a presence to be reckoned with. “We knew she was outspoken; we’d heard about her,” Paramount production manager Sam Jaffe recalled in 1992, seventy years after he had moved to Los Angeles in 1922, when Sunset Boulevard was a dirt road all the way to the Santa Monica beach. “We knew she was a person that—either she did it unconsciously or consciously—but she did things to shock you.”

  She found some willing conspirators in outrageousness, including her alleged rival Marlene Dietrich. At Paramount’s Culver City studios their dressing rooms were adjacent to each other. They took pleasure in raising eyebrows with fortissimo boasts of lesbian seductions and they decided to start rumors of an affair between them. Dietrich was known to powder her hair with gold for the camera. Tallulah reportedly appeared on the set one day and, in front of dozens of assembled crew, held up her dress to reveal pubic hair powdered in gold.

  As Jaffe got to know her, however, he discovered other facets, including “an interesting side; a warmth about family.” She was interested in his home life, his three daughters, his upbringing on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants. “You could assume that she had no interest in human beings as a rule, but that’s not true.”

  She rented a home at 1712 North Stanley Avenue from silent screen star William Haines, who was starting a new career as an interior decorator. On December 30, 1931, Edie wrote Marie that they were now comfortably settled in, with three servants in residence. Edie was enclosing a check for fifty dollars from Tallulah, “who says she would so much like to have made it larger but she has had so many heavy expenses during the last month. . . .” Tallulah’s expenses were not exactly ones Marie could have sympathized with: she had bought a Rolls-Royce, a complete new wardrobe, and another Augustus John painting. “However she says she is not going to spend any more money for weeks and weeks. . . .”

  Audry and Kenneth Carten came from London for a long visit; when they left, actor Alan Vincent moved in. Vincent played minor roles in films and when he was out of work did secretarial work for some of the major stars. He was a perfect companion and escort for Tallulah: slim, good-looking, “very funny, very witty, a highbrow,” Douglas Fairbanks Jr. recalled.

  He was also gay, and thus more likely to be accepted by Tallulah as friend rather than sexual quarry.

  Although Tallulah was fast discovering that film was not her optimal medium, Hollywood was in one way the perfect place for her. Back in 1928, the London Graphic’s Hubert Farjeon, in a state of high irritation over her performance in the play Blackmail, had written: “The surprising thing about Miss Bankhead is that she should be on the stage, for she looks like a film star, she acts like a film star, she tosses her hair back like a film star, and the plays in which she appears are essentially film-star plays.”

  In Hollywood there was no stigma attached to “personality” acting.

  The glamorizing that movie stars received was sufficient transformation for any role they were called upon to assume. They were loved for their mannerisms and because they projected a specific and consistent persona. And they rarely risked ruffling their audience’s expectations by playing a role against type. This was actually standard practice as well for most of the great Broadway and West End stage stars. But the critics liked to pretend that it wasn’t, as though by pretending, they could make the theater conform to an academic ideal rather than continue to function as a market-place, in which stars were the choicest commodity.

  Detractors who decry Tallulah’s “playing herself” measure her work against a criterion that in actuality does not exist and never has. Most theatrical impersonation has been about an
actor’s repetition and development of a key persona. This was as true during the Renaissance heyday of the Italian commedia dell’arte mime shows, in which actors performed the same types during their entire careers, as it was in the repertory companies of the nineteenth century, when representation was broken down into specific “lines of business” on which actors based their careers. More frankly than anywhere else in the entertainment world of this century, Hollywood accepted typecasting as a given, and this assumption powered the industry’s fortunes.

  Although Tallulah said that the camera stifled her, actually she learned valuable lessons as she studied the craft of film acting. On January 28, 1932, Marie wrote that she had just received a letter from Samuel M. Peck, poet laureate of Alabama. He had seen The Cheat and wrote: “What pleased me from the first about her acting is that every look, gesture and accent means something essential to the drama given.” He ranked her economy with the French actors of the Comédie Française, whom he considered the finest in the world.

  But as she began working on Thunder Below, her fourth film for Paramount, Tallulah was forced to heed the consensus that her career was foundering. Silver Screen published a eulogy in its February issue: “She won her spurs in England but we seem to want to give her the boot.” In Britain, Picturegoer Weekly was protesting: “Far better would it have been if Tallulah had stayed in London.”

  For a woman whose beauty was integral to her sense of personal and professional worth, the most disorienting realization must have been the discovery that she was not considered ideally photogenic. This may not have been the first time she had heard this, however. “Some of the angles used from which to photograph her ought to be avoided,” Variety’s “Frat.”had written about His House in Order when it was shown at New York’s Palace early in 1928.