Tallulah!

by Joel Lobenthal

  Edie enclosed a check for $100 and expressed Tallulah’s regrets that she could not send more. Tallulah’s aunt on her mother’s side, Clara Mae Floyd, whom Tallulah had likely met as a child but had not seen for many years, had written to Tallulah “three pathetic letters,” and Tallulah felt obliged to help her out with her taxes. Tallulah was also contributing to Eugenia’s financial upkeep. “Incidentally I have to write to her and inform her that Miss Tallulah will have to cut her allowance too, as times really are bad and according to all accounts this time next year all film stars will only be getting a quarter of what they are getting now, and the income tax as you know will be much heavier.” Edie did not add the conviction she and Tallulah must have shared, that their stint in Hollywood was fast outlasting its usefulness to either Tallulah or the movie industry.

  “I Want a Man!”

  “I might lay my eyes on a man and have an affaire with him the next hour.”

  Tallulah did not go out all that often while she was in Hollywood. Social life was nothing like what she’d known in New York or London.

  When working, screen actors were required to rise just about the time that Tallulah was used to falling asleep. When she did go out, however, she was sure to make a stir. “If a party is dull, it is always Tallulah who animates the crowd,” Marcella Burke wrote in Screen Book magazine. “I have seen her jump on a table in one of the Biltmore bungalows at a supper party given for Ina Claire and dance divinely.” A little while later, the guests were “silenced by the sheer beauty of Tallulah standing against a wall giving a swift impersonation of Sarah Bernhardt.” She wrapped a scarf around her throat, pushed her hair over the forehead, lifted her face “tip-tilted against eternity,” and declaimed a few words in French. “Tallulah had transmitted the spirit of The Divine Sarah. . . .”

  Burke does not recall Claire’s reaction to Tallulah’s hijinks. Perhaps she found them as entertaining as Burke did. Perhaps Claire’s supper did need some enlivening. But surrounded by peers and competitors as she was, Tallulah’s need to make a stir rarely brooked recognition that a party was supposed to revolve around anyone else. Hollywood placed a greater store on toeing the line than did London or New York, but Tallulah had little respect for the rules of Hollywood’s game. “People were frightened of her, a little on edge,” Douglas Fairbanks Jr. recalled. “You never knew what she was going to do or say. She was impulsive and a law unto herself.”

  Tallulah’s irreverence was only sharpened by the pretensions of this most vainglorious of company towns. Sam Jaffe said that at one party a woman walked up to her and introduced herself, “Miss Bankhead, I’m Mrs.Joe E. Brown,” to which Tallulah replied, “That’s the way you cheapen yourself.”

  Given the chance to be introduced to her adored Greta Garbo by screenwriters Salka and Berthold Viertel, Tallulah was “a little awed in her presence,” she recalls in Tallulah. Over dinner, Tallulah clowned excessively before Garbo. Nevertheless, Garbo accepted when Tallulah subsequently invited her to dinner. Tallulah recalls, “When at ease with people who do not look upon her as something begat by the Sphinx and Frigga, Norse goddess of the sky, she can be as much fun as the next gal.”

  Fairbanks’s then-wife, Joan Crawford, asked Tallulah to a small dinner party and assured her that dress would be casual. When Tallulah arrived in slacks, she was greeted by Crawford decked out as if she were going to opening night at the Metropolitan Opera. Fairbanks thought that Crawford was very likely intimidated; such elaborate dress was not customary when they entertained. Nevertheless, Tallulah and Crawford enjoyed each other very much. “Whatever Joan’s notions of informality, she could be prankish,” Tallulah writes. Crawford had told her not to bring an escort; she was inviting someone she thought that Tallulah might like. The blind date turned out to be eight-year-old Jackie Cooper, accompanied by his mother. Tallulah had indeed adored his performance in Skippy, going back four times to see it.

  Fairbanks said that Tallulah was “housebroken” whenever he saw her; indeed she parlayed her “exquisite” manners into a mark of distinction.

  “She was very consciously upper class in a world that was drawn mostly from either lower or middle,” he said. “She knew that she was Southern aristo and never let you forget it, either. She didn’t say it in so many words; it was just her attitude.

  “The feeling people had about her: she was born of a privileged class,”he said with a chuckle, “and just took advantage of those privileges—which were not those shared with other lesser mortals.”

  It was her relationships with her fellow stars that Motion Picture Story magazine’s Gladys Hall wanted to discuss when she interviewed Tallulah in the summer of 1932. The subsequent article caused such a furor that some serious ostracism undoubtedly set in as a result. Hall asked Tallulah if Hollywood was giving her the cold shoulder. Tallulah said if it was, “I haven’t felt the chill. It is news to me. It may be that I am suspected of giving Hollywood the cold shoulder—because I accept so few invitations. Because I have never given parties. Because such hospitality as I have accepted I haven’t returned. It has reached a point now where, if I gave a party at all, I would have to invite about five hundred people.”

  Tallulah didn’t really want to talk about Hollywood, but she had a lot she wanted to get off her chest. She wanted to defend herself against the canard that she was frivolous. She wanted to explain herself.

  I have an inferiority complex. It is my defense mechanism working. So that, if I take a fall, if I fail here or there, if the movies or a man chuck me out on my ear, people will laugh it off and say, “Oh, well, Tallulah doesn’t care!” But I would care. I’d care all right, but not so much as if people knew that I cared. I can’t bear pity. I can’t endure sympathy. A kindly pat on my bowed shoulder would drive me nuts.

  She said that she might “lay my eyes on a man and have an affaire with him the next hour.” But she insisted that her behavior was not compulsive:“Promiscuity implies that attraction is not necessary.” Nevertheless, Tallulah had been living quietly for some time. “I haven’t had an affaire for six months,” she said to Hall. “Six months! Too long. If there’s anything the matter with me now, it’s certainly not Hollywood or Hollywood’s state of mind. The matter with me is, I WANT A MAN! . . . six months is a long, long time. I want a man!”

  Tallulah had committed what was in Hollywood an unpardonable sin: underscoring the obvious truth that stars enjoyed sexual license denied most of their fans. Morality clauses in most stars’ contracts meant that they could be disciplined or dismissed for conduct unbecoming a public icon.

  In 1993, ex-Follies girl and actress Lina Basquette recalled her friend Clara Bow tooling around Hollywood at night during the late 1920s to pick up men. Basquette chastised her for risking the rupture of a hugely lucrative Paramount contract. Many stars were similarly one step away from disgrace.

  After the article-induced backlash began, Tallulah issued the requisite denial that she had said what Hall said she had said. Time reported that Will Hays, moral watchdog for the industry as head of the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association, had reprimanded Hall, Motion Picture magazine, and the Paramount publicity bureau. Hays’s office was considering adding to its onerous code a regulation against “verbal moral turpitude” on the part of cinema celebrities. A plan was also considered that would have imposed censorship strictures on journalists before the studios permitted their stars to receive the press.

  Aunt Marie cannot have still been as naive about Tallulah’s lifestyle as she had been in 1928, when she vented to Will her fantasy about Tallulah’s closely harbored affections. Indeed, in 1931 she had written to Tallulah:

  “You have made your own reputation and it would be very unfitting of me to attempt to impose any old fashioned ideals upon you. The fact of the business is I am not as old fashioned a person in my own ideals as most of my generation.” But the Motion Picture Story interview was too much for her. On August 6, she wrote Tallulah a blistering letter that
concluded with: “I suppose you will never want to see or hear of me again. I don’t know how you will take this letter. I mean it for your good, just as I used to spank you when you were a kid.” Marie signed, “With love and grief.”

  Tallulah responded with a contrite telegram, asking her to send it on to Will if he had read the article, but if he had not,“DON’T WORRY ABOUT HIM AND ABOUT IT HEREAFTER I SHALL REFUSE ALL MAGAZINE INTERVIEWERS. . . . PLEASE BELIEVE ME I COULD NOT AND WOULD NOT SAY OR DO ONE TENTH OF THE THINGS THAT ARE ACCREDITED TO ME.”

  Marie was relieved, but she had a new admonition that Tallulah must have found devastating. Will had been in Montgomery and he, too, had read the article, telling Marie that “he was going to write to you but that he had been too hurt to do so as he did not wish to be unkind.” Marie was astonished when Will told her that he had not had a single letter from Tallulah since she’d moved west nine months earlier.

  I do not see, Tallulah, my child, how you can wound as loving and devoted a father as Will has been to you by neglecting him in this manner.

  It would take you only a few minutes to drop him a few lines each week and in the years to come when he has left us you will be happy to think you gave him that much pleasure.

  It was not until Will’s death in 1940 that Tallulah began to construct a revisionist fable about their relationship, positioning him as the veritable center of her world and her affections. But the surviving paper trail records her attempts to put definite boundaries around their relationship during his lifetime. She knew that he would have disapproved of much in her life, but her insistence on divulging nothing at all to him for long stretches was obviously motivated by more than her need to shield herself from unwelcome disapproval. After the disappointments of the past, she must have found it safer to keep him at a distance. Unable as she was, perhaps, to discuss her lingering resentments, her distancing sent a continuous message of reproach. Yet when she did write, her invariable recitation of only good news also tells us how much she sought his approval, and of late Tallulah had not had that much good news to share with him.

  The film MGM chose for Tallulah was called Faithless, which was based on Tinfoil, a novel by Mildred Cram. It was perhaps the most pronounced expression of the theme Tallulah plied in all her films from 1931 to 1932.

  She was once again a well-bred woman struggling to retain her integrity, autonomy, and identity when toppled from her high perch, or in eminent danger of being so. But in Faithless she played a much more spoiled and reckless playgirl, whose comedown was therefore that much more excruci-ating. Carol Morgan’s extravagance strips her completely of her erstwhile insulation from life’s miseries. Like Dietrich’s Blonde Venus and Bow’s Call Her Savage, both made the same year as Faithless, the film pulls out all the stops and is packed with incident. Vignette after vignette shows us Tallulah—magnificently dressed by Adrian—as heiress, society parasite, kept woman, impoverished wife, and prostitute.

  Faithless was directed by journeyman Harry Beaumont, who fourteen years earlier had directed Tallulah in the silent Thirty a Week. In Faithless he elicited from her the finest acting she had yet done in films. Tallulah imbues frivolous Carol Morgan with the pluck and grit and, eventually, the moral integrity of heroines penned by Charlotte Brontë or Edith Wharton.

  More than in Tallulah’s preceding films, in Faithless the spiral down is preceded by and interwoven with episodes of comic relief and madcap exuberance. We sense an all but palpable delight on Tallulah’s part at finally being given enough comedy to allow her to show her skills. With dazzling élan, she bites into a series of battle-of-the-sexes exchanges with equally expert Robert Montgomery. After Tallulah’s death, Montgomery told Brendan Gill that he had fallen ill shortly before Faithless was due to go into production. MGM offered to find Tallulah a replacement, but she elected to wait for Montgomery. Doubtless she knew that he was a better comedian than any of her preceding leading men on screen.

  Montgomery plays Bill Wade, a young advertising executive who wants to marry Tallulah but insists they will live on his income rather than her fortune. After the stock market wipes out her fortune, she decides to accept his offer, until he tells her that he, too, is now penniless because he has just been fired. She is not yet willing to endure poverty and instead embarks on a series of stints freeloading on acquaintances in the gilded set.

  Eventually she is driven bag and baggage out of a nouveau riche’s mansion by her hostess when she discovers that Tallulah is borrowing money from her friends.

  As Tallulah is exiting furtively, the husband, played by Hugh Herbert, buttonholes her and lets her know that he is willing to stake his own interest in her welfare. Mordant irony suffuses her responses throughout their scene. Herbert’s inimitable comic eccentricity again gives Tallulah a delicious foil. As in so much of the best high comedy, words become weapons to parry, to cloak, and to disguise.

  “Why, if it weren’t for this depression I wouldn’t have a chance with a high-class dame like you,” Herbert tells her.

  “It’s an ill wind—” Tallulah responds. “But the depression is over, Mr.Blaney. The panic is now on. So I don’t believe I care to buy your violets.”

  Uttering the word panic, Tallulah with the lightest of touches tells us that the nation’s panic is hers as well, and tells us what she thinks of the disingenuous euphemism. But she is still proud enough to wriggle out of his en-treaties no matter what abyss is her alternative. She accepts money from him only after he has convinced her that there are no strings attached.

  When next we see her, however, she has rather abruptly become his mistress. (It is possible that intervening scenes were filmed and then cut.) When Montgomery tracks her down, Tallulah is now glad to throw over her gilded imprisonment and settle down to blissful connubial poverty. A whole new series of setbacks results in her being forced to walk the streets to pay for medicine for her husband. The inescapable desperation of America at that moment allowed Hollywood to speak bluntly about economic conditions. “Nothing matters when you haven’t eaten for two days,” Tallulah had muttered during one of the film’s earlier crises.

  Faithless is one of the most honest films about the reasons why women go into prostitution. It is impossible for Tallulah’s Carol Morgan to find any other job. In an exquisitely lit and photographed scene amid the gloom of their tenement apartment, Tallulah exhibits some sublime pathos as she prepares to undergo her first foray into prostitution, and does so again as she returns, numb with humiliation. Her eyes certainly do not appear“dead,” but rather large, luminous, and communicative. It must be noted, too, that Tallulah in all her films uses her eyelids as expertly as her eyes.

  Few actresses have evinced such skill at using them to flash a fast and curt rebuke, or slowly lowering them to denote thought or comprehension.

  “The reason I use my lids as I do,” she told a reporter, “is that when I was a girl I had a habit of nervously blinking my eyes, and I determined to end it. For a long time when I’d start to talk, I would keep my lids lowered.” In reality, this tic actually continued to plague her throughout her life.

  Tallulah told Screen Book’s Marcella Burke that she wanted to leave Hollywood. “But I don’t want to leave until I’ve made one good picture.”

  She hoped that Faithless “will be better than the others. I honestly feel it is good, but then—I may be all wrong,” she said with a shrug.

  Tallulah’s current option was due to expire on September 20, 1932.

  Variety reported that the fate of Faithless would influence Paramount’s decision about renewing. MGM was sufficiently impressed by the rushes to offer Tallulah Jean Harlow’s role in Red Dust after Harlow’s husband Paul Bern killed himself on Labor Day. Louis B. Mayer was worried that the publicity would repel the public. Tallulah reports that she was offended by Mayer’s offer to gain from Harlow’s tragedy and turned it down.

  Faithless was seen in some Midwestern cities at the end of October, but not released nationwide until Thanksg
iving. Reviews were bad, even severe. The New York Evening Post complained that “The smart-aleck dialogue, the utter lack of distinction in the handling of the theme, works continuously and fatally against the efforts of Miss Bankhead and Mr.Montgomery to bring their roles to life. What they are dealing with is trash, and neither is capable of disguising it.”

  Tallulah claimed that both Paramount and MGM had asked her to remain at a lower salary. But shortly after Faithless opened nationwide to lukewarm business, she was on a train back to New York with Edie Smith.

  By her own accounting she had saved $200,000 and thus could easily afford the vagaries of live theater. The stage offered a visceral satisfaction that films could not give her. “Put me on a lighted stage before a crowded house,” she told Silver Screen, “and I’m myself.”

  Back on Broadway

  “I’m still an optimist in spite of everything.”

  Tallulah arrived at Grand Central on December 4, 1932, accompanied by Edie Smith, eight trunks, sixteen small packages, three portable phonographs, five hat boxes, and forty-eight pairs of shoes. Such was the inventory tallied by the New York Sun’s Ward Morehouse, who interviewed her a few days later in her suite at the Pierre. She told him that she wanted to do a play on Broadway, “but not any play. I’m still an optimist in spite of everything. I hope to find a play, a good one. If I do I’ll stay. I’d like to stay.If I don’t I’m off to London.”

  After two years of celluloid melodramas, tragedies, and weepies, Tallulah wanted to do a comedy; laughter was the logical refuge for Depression audiences. In Hollywood, Tallulah had told a reporter that Zoë Akins, who was now writing for the movies, was working on a play for her. But in New York she heard about Forsaking All Others, a drawing-room comedy that she had first read while still in Hollywood. It was written by two beginners, Fred Cavett, who had worked as assistant cameraman at Paramount, and Edward Roberts, a graduate of Professor George Pierce Baker’s famous playwriting workshop at Yale. Tallulah thought it would be perfect for Hope Williams and forwarded it on to her. In New York, producer Arthur Hopkins optioned it for Williams, but it turned out she had now chosen to do something else. Tallulah heard that Hopkins was relinquishing his option and bought the play.