Tallulah!

by Joel Lobenthal

  After Tallulah’s death, George Cukor insisted a number of times that her face was not suited to the screen. “On the stage she had beautiful coloring,” he told Gavin Lambert, “and on the screen she had beautiful bones, but her eyes were not eyes for movies. They looked somehow hooded and dead. . . . Her smile didn’t illuminate, when she spoke her mouth didn’t look graceful, and her eyes never really lighted up.”

  Although Tallulah certainly did not mate with the camera the way Garbo did, Cukor’s remarks demonstrate a lack of insight that is surprising in a director of his caliber. “I don’t know what in the world he’s talking about,” said Artie Jacobson, who was assistant director on the two films that Tallulah made for Paramount in Hollywood. “There may have been certain scenes where he felt that way, but I never found it. We never had any photographic problems with her at all.”

  Perhaps Cukor was rationalizing the undoubted fact that Tallulah was better photographed in all the pictures that followed his own Tarnished Lady. Cukor was relatively inexperienced and would have been apt to leave photographic issues to the cameraman. But Tallulah herself internalized the criticism. “I think I am simply awful-looking . . . on the screen,” she told Hollywood reporter Dorothy Spensley, “unnatural, awkward, graceless. I never get used to myself. . . . Until I went into pictures, I thought I had a face, but now I know I haven’t. Oh, I have good eyes, but my nose . . .”

  In Britain, Picturegoer Weekly had even published news of the plastic surgery she had undergone in London. What has not been said as frequently is that Dietrich herself had a broad and inelegant nose, and so did Claudette Colbert, Ginger Rogers, and Carole Lombard. And, of course, each of these women had a glorious film career.

  More relevant is the question of Tallulah’s persona. In her review of Tarnished Lady, Regina Crewe wrote in the New York American, “She brings a distinct new type to the screen,” which was very true, and it may be that hers was a problematic type for that place and time. In 1972’s From Reverence to Rape, Molly Haskell writes that in American movies, “we rarely see a morally ambiguous heroine, who doesn’t fit into the dramatic dialectics of an either/or, virgin/whore polarity.” This is just what Tallulah did: her randy yet socially impeccable heroines transgressed that dichotomy. Tallulah’s behavior on-screen could almost be as reprobate as Dietrich’s, but unlike Dietrich or Garbo, Tallulah was never exotic enough to represent the

  “Other.” Thus she was perhaps more insidious than her foreign rivals. Perhaps she made Americans uncomfortable: the mass American audience did not want to see itself as morally ambiguous. Surely that was at least as much a factor in Tallulah’s disappointing box-office performance as the somewhat bulbous tip of her nose.

  Thunder Below was an adaptation of the book by Thomas Rourke. After Marie heard that Tallulah was going to star in the film adaptation, she read the novel and offered the sort of unsolicited opinion that could only have made Tallulah doubly glad that she had not signed Marie on to her staff.

  It is very fortunate that the moving picture playwrights so reconstruct a book that the author himself cannot recognize it. How an appealing screen play can be made from such an obscene story is more than I can comprehend. I was in hopes that your producers would select for you something of a nobler character for your next production.

  Marie did have a point. Thunder Below was a dismal tale of adultery in the oil fields of Central America. Tallulah was Susan, a stir-crazy tropical wife à la Maugham’s Leslie Crosby in The Letter. Her husband Walt was Charles Bickford; Paul Lukas was her lover as well as her husband’s best friend. When Susan and Ken learn that Walt is going blind, they don’t have the heart to go through with their plan to run off together. She latches onto another man, a temporary visitor to the tropics, and considers using him as her escape hatch out, but is then briefly reunited with Ken before he becomes once more overwhelmed by remorse. She, too, understands the fu-tility of their relationship and gallantly forgives him for failing her once more, then leaps to her death.

  The film was directed by Richard Wallace. He was not a particularly distinguished director, but Tallulah found him “a divine man.” He had once operated a merry-go-round in a carnival; before that he had been a medical student, later an undertaker’s assistant. He was fascinated by ca-davers. Once, after a trying day at the studio, he took her to a morgue.

  “Tallulah, this should cheer you up. See how peaceful they are.”

  On March 24, Edie wrote Marie conveying Tallulah’s regrets at not being able to send $500 that Marie had requested. Tallulah was again in financial distress, having had to pay $15,000 in IRS arrears. Her checking account was overdrawn, and her trust fund was off-limits. “She is miserable at not being able to help you out, but when financial conditions are better, she promises to send you a check.”

  Rather than the hoped-for improvement, Thunder Below turned out to be slow, heavy, ponderous, enlivened by some comic relief from Eugene Pallette. The Times (London) called Tallulah’s performance in it “steady and unextravagant,” which was perhaps high praise given the criticism her alleged onstage excesses there had reaped. “It is not her fault that we are given scarcely more than a glimpse of the mind of the woman she represents.” Tallulah was “too good an actress” to let Thunder Below “curdle entirely,” Gerald Breitigam wrote in the New York World Telegram. “Despite the blueprint which the screen play follows there is room for loveliness and splendid tragedy and glamour in the characterization of Susan, and Miss Bankhead does have her moments. There is one high point, indeed, in which her voice plucks at the heartstrings. But in the main her characterization lacks the changing colors to make it really stand out.”

  While Tallulah is at all times challenged by Thunder Below’s banality, she usually fights it to no less than a draw. She achieves something almost unheard of in films at that time: convincingly portraying a woman nearly eaten alive with frustrated sexual desire who is not working class, not a native tribeswoman, not a prostitute. She is a well-bred white woman, and Tallulah supplies one of her most provocative floutings of conventional screen morality, which preferred to confine adultery to the socially marginal. Tallulah’s Susan is at all times sympathetic, yet her frustration and restlessness make her a potential menace to herself and others. Too guilty to leave her husband when she finds out he is going blind, eventually she is furious at her lover for being just as paralyzed by guilt. “I’m what any woman would be living like this, only I’m being honest about it!” she tells Lukas in a scene where—in the couched language of the era—she demands that he sleep with her or repudiate her entirely.

  Paramount had put Tallulah again and again into lugubrious melodrama. Reviewing Thunder Below, Marguerite Tazelaar in the New York Herald Tribune bemoaned the fact that “It has been Miss Bankhead’s ill fortune to be cast in another role where sustained moping and sad-eyed histrionics are demanded of her instead of the high comedy and ironic characterization she does so brilliantly.” Tallulah could surely have become one of the screen’s most illustrious comediennes, but Paramount was churning out vehicles for many of its stars without ensuring their quality. In its January 5, 1932, issue, Variety had written that while “heavily ballyhooed,” Tallulah’s films of 1931 had “registered only mildly, due, no doubt, as in the case of Miss [Ruth] Chatterton and other Paramount personalities, to unfortunate choice of material.” Von Sternberg wisely restricted the number of movies in which he directed Dietrich. Dishonored was the only film in which she starred in 1931. But Tallulah had cranked out three, Chatterton four.

  Nineteen thirty-two was turning into a disastrous year for Paramount, after a decade-long run of spectacular success. Employees had been paid in stock options, which had now plummeted in value. Hundreds of Paramount employees were fired, and the remainder, including Tallulah, were forced to accept salary cuts. Studio head B. P. Schulberg was about to lose his job. Production manager Sam Jaffe’s sister Adeleine had married Schulberg, when she was a secretary and he was a newspaper reporter
. “Schulberg couldn’t handle it all,” said Jaffe. “He made too much money, and he destroyed himself fucking and drinking.” Wanger and Schulberg had a falling-out and Wanger departed. Schulberg began a long affair with Sylvia Sidney, which preoccupied him. Jaffe would walk into Schulberg’s office and be told that he was at the tailor, the dentist—“And I knew what that meant.”

  Gary Cooper and Others

  “I’m only one of the million gals who’d love to hear their most personal question answered, ‘Yup.’ ”

  Director Marion Gering’s success at Paramount could be seen to typify the studio-wide malaise that had struck Paramount. Gering had come to the U.S. as part of a Soviet trade delegation in 1924. Sylvia Sidney brought Gering with her to Hollywood after he directed her on Broadway in Bad Girl, the play that brought her to Hollywood’s attention. He directed Sidney’s first film and several of her subsequent vehicles at Paramount.

  “He was the kind of a guy that looked over his shoulder,” Artie Jacobson said. “Nervous. Very dependent.” “I thought he was lousy,” Jaffe agreed, “but Schulberg was taken with him. He seemed to get along with Sylvia Sidney and he played up to Schulberg.”

  Gering was assigned to direct Tallulah’s next film, The Devil and the Deep, although when recalling the production, Jacobson insinuated that he was forced to shoulder much of the directorial burden. It was written by Benn Levy, in whose Mud and Treacle Tallulah had starred four years earlier in London. He was in the middle of a brief but distinguished stint in Hollywood, where his wife, actress Constance Cummings, was also under contract.

  Tallulah plays Diana Storm, the wife of a psychotically jealous marine commander, Charles Storm, played by Charles Laughton in his Hollywood debut. They are stationed together in a desert port in the Middle East, amid a British community that doesn’t question Storm’s jovial hail-fellow-well-met manner. They commiserate about his marital unhappiness, but behind closed doors he brutalizes his wife. He has dismissed and thus disgraced young Lieutenant Jaeckel—Cary Grant—because he suspects him of having an affair with Diana. She tries to save Jaeckel’s career and exonerate herself by letting her husband eavesdrop on a meeting between them. What follows is a beautifully acted scene riddled with unspoken tension. Tallulah must not let her husband think she is deliberately deflecting a confession of love from Grant, all the while hoping desperately that none will be forthcoming.

  Laughton is unconvinced, and after he turns violent, Tallulah stumbles out of their house. Swept along by a tide of native feast-day celebrants, she is all but trampled until she is rescued by a handsome stranger, played by Gary Cooper. “I want never to have been born,” she tells him, but is consoled by their night of love on the sands—consoled and newly empow-ered. When Laughton asks her the next morning where she has been, she informs him, “You’ve lost the right to ask that question.”

  Later that very same day, Cooper comes to their house and she realizes that he is the Lieutenant Sempter her husband has hired to replace Jaeckel.

  Cooper is captivated by Laughton’s hearty bonhomie and appears disgusted by Tallulah’s infidelity. After Laughton manages to discover all, Tallulah sneaks on board his submarine the night it is scheduled to sail, suspicious that Laughton is plotting a catastrophic revenge. He does engineer a collision between his submarine and a freighter, relieving Cooper of his duties when he tries to rescue their vessel. Laughton wants them all to die together. Only now does Cooper see Laughton’s true colors. The crew mutinies after Tallulah steps forward to implicate her husband. She and Cooper escape with the crew, while Laughton chooses to die, opening the sluices and laughing maniacally as his cabin floods.

  Tallulah found Cooper very compelling indeed. In New York a year earlier, Walter Wanger had sent Cooper to replace him when he couldn’t take Tallulah to a Beatrice Lillie opening as planned. Tallulah proceeded to chatter nervously all evening and the abashed Cooper didn’t utter a single word. In Hollywood she told Jaffe, “I like him very much. I’m going to fuck him.” “I said, ‘I’m sure you will,’ ” Jaffe remembered. Weeks later he walked on the set where Cooper and Tallulah were working. “She looked at me and winked and nodded her head, as if to say, ‘Yes, it’s been done.’ ” But things had actually not turned out as Tallulah intended.

  The long climactic sequence on board Laughton’s sub was filmed at night, and their meal break was at midnight rather than midday. One midnight, Jacobson didn’t see Tallulah in the studio commissary. He went back to the set to look for her. She wasn’t there either, but Cooper was returning from his meal. Jacobson watched as he walked into his dressing room and came bounding out with lipstick printed from forehead to chin. Cooper started to run out to his car, Tallulah in hot pursuit, her evening gown hiked over her knees. Jacobson caught up with Cooper in Beverly Hills and brought him back to the studio in Hollywood.

  Cooper’s rejection did not diminish Tallulah’s admiration. In 1935, screenwriter Frances Marion joined Tallulah’s table at the Stork Club, where an argument was in progress.

  “You call that acting?” a Cooper detractor was saying, sniggering. “All he can say is ‘Yup.’ ”

  “His casual charm appeals to me,” Tallulah retorted. “It’s more effective than watching you hams emote.”

  “Dry up, Tallu, you’re not thinking about his acting.”

  “You’re damned right! I’m only one of the million gals who’d love to hear their most personal question answered, ‘Yup.’ ”

  “I enjoyed her,” Jacobson recalled. “Very down-to-earth, never said,‘I’m Tallulah Bankhead, who the hell are you?’ A nice gal to work with, great sense of humor.” But Jacobson was aware of some prior history between Tallulah and Laughton that perhaps explained the friction on the set of The Devil and the Deep.

  Laughton was Stanislavsky-influenced and could not just walk in and do a close-up cold. He had to go through the entire scene first, and his shoulders would start heaving as he worked himself into the climactic declarations that were going to receive close-up scrutiny.

  One day they were filming and Laughton’s shoulders were heaving when onto the set drifted the syncopated strains of “Darktown Strutters’Ball.” Laughton stopped heaving. “What the hell is that? How can I do a scene? Oh, I think I know what it is.” He demanded that Jacobson “go in there and tell that bitch I’m rehearsing. Break the record if you have to.”

  “What does that ass want?” Tallulah asked Jacobson in her dressing room.

  “He’s trying to do a scene, and you’re playing a record.”

  “I want to play my record. If he’s the actor he claims he is. . . .” She chewed Jacobson’s ear with a tirade but did turn off her gramophone—for a while. When her musicale resumed, Jacobson went back to Tallulah with a cease-and-desist order; otherwise she’d be held responsible for interfering with production.

  “Oh, I got to him, eh?”

  Laughton exacted his revenge. When they filmed a scene where Laughton slaps her, he delivered a blow that knocked her out of camera range. “She went right across the set,” Jacobson recalled. “We had to fix the makeup each time. You’d see his fingerprints on her cheek. We did four takes and each time the same thing happened.” Assaulting Tallulah with accusations about her fidelity, Laughton made sure his sibilant consonants sprayed spittle across Tallulah’s face.

  The Devil and the Deep has its own twist of originality and it benefits from the superb photography of Charles Lang. The production is very handsome, simulating the North African desert as evocatively as Morocco or The Garden of Allah. Levy took any number of critical hits for his screenplay. Of course we know no more about how much of it is actually his than we do about most films’ credited authors. High colored as the genre and story required, but enhanced by drawing-room literacy, it is certainly better than most of the hack scripts that Hollywood was filming. Laughton is allowed to be sympathetic as well as repugnant. Tallulah’s role allows her varied dimensions to exploit. She displays a dignity and distinction that
is a little different from what we’ve seen in her previous films. Diana is the most polite and mature of her Paramount heroines. At the same time this is the most neurotic of Tallulah’s screen characterizations, limning in no uncertain terms a woman battered by psychic and physical abuse. Indeed, she is almost too jumpy and tortured to be classed as a conventional screen heroine. Dietrich or Garbo would never have allowed their beauty to be mussed by as many twitches, fumbles, and hesitations. Tallulah is on edge for almost every one of The Devil and the Deep’s seventy-six minutes.

  After it was released mid-August, Mordaunt Hall wrote in the New York Times that “this melodrama, owing to the excellent work of Mr.Laughton and Tallulah Bankhead, succeeds in being something out of the ordinary and a picture that always holds one’s attention.” In the Daily News, Richard Watts Jr. complained about Levy’s dialogue and wrote, “It does, however, serve to indicate how fine an actress Miss Bankhead really is. The synthetic speech and emotions of her role, under her skillful handling, take on a surprising quality of reality and poignancy.”

  One of the very few contemporary critics to see Tallulah’s screen performances unclouded by current critical dogma is actor and author Simon Callow. In his 1988 book Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor, he writes that Tallulah’s performance “now seems an extraordinarily original portrait of an unfulfilled and oppressed woman, bored and unhappy, oddly attached to the paranoically jealous husband that Laughton plays. . . .”

  Almost inexplicably this time, Tallulah’s film failed to elicit more than a tepid response from the public. Several weeks before the film’s release, Paramount had already decided to loan Tallulah to MGM for her next project. Edie wrote Marie that she and Tallulah were looking forward to the change. They sensed that the studio was imploding. “There have been so many changes made in the Paramount staff during the last two months, and no one seems to know what they are doing.”