Tallulah!

by Joel Lobenthal

  Forsaking All Others wasn’t just any play, but it was not exceptional either. “I was aware it was not a masterpiece,” she writes in Tallulah, “but it was better than many of the seances in which I flourished in London.” The play treated the romantic upheavals of one Mary Clay, a young member of the Park Avenue set. After being ditched at the altar by her fiancé since childhood, she mourns her rejection and then realizes that she’s actually in love with a dark-horse suitor of hers.

  Tallulah tried to find a producer to back the script, but even more than the movie business, the theater was smarting from the Depression. During the 1920s, producers thought nothing of investing their own money in shows, routinely risking and often suffering grave reversals. The collapse of the stock market had wiped out a number of major producers irrevocably.

  Tallulah decided to produce the play herself, with the encouragement of Leland Hayward, a leading agent who later became a major Broadway producer. Hayward was an informal adviser to her at the time. It was reported in the press only that she had a financial interest in the play, which was not uncommon for Broadway stars. According to Tallulah, Hayward assured her that additional backers would materialize, but all the money that was staked turned out to be hers alone. And Tallulah insisted on the finest of everything: Time would describe one of Donald Oenslager’s settings for Forsaking All Others as “the best-looking stage drawing room on Broadway.”

  Before she started work, Tallulah visited Washington to finally touch base with Will and Florence again. On January 10, 1933, Will wrote Marie: “Tallulah spent two days with us here and we had a big time together. She is certainly a most delightful child and inasmuch as I had not seen her for two years I enjoyed every minute of her visit.” Her father would have been alarmed at her sinking her own money into as risky an undertaking as a Broadway play.

  As always, she did not tell him the whole truth. He informed Marie that Tallulah was “not financing the play which she is proposing to put on,” but informed her that Tallulah had purchased the play itself “and will have all moving picture rights in the event the play is a success and will also participate in the profits of the stage play in the event there are any.”

  Producing a play “involves a lot of dickering with scene designers, directors, actors, theater managers and booking agents,” Tallulah writes. “I wasn’t up to it.” She recruited Archie Selwyn as her producing deputy, but he was only one of a gaggle of advisers. It was “a department of utter confusion and chaos,” Jean Dalrymple recalled in 1982. “Everybody had something to say.”

  Dalrymple was handling press for the show. She had until recently been press agent for producer John Golden, and later enjoyed a long career as a producer. At the time, she was married to Ward Morehouse, who recommended her to Hayward as a staunch Tallulah booster. Dalrymple had been informally issuing around town a vehement rebuttal to the consensus that Tallulah had flopped in Hollywood. Dalrymple believed instead that the hyperbole with which Tallulah’s film career had been launched had unfairly aroused expectations that she outstrip Dietrich or Garbo. “Who could? It made me very angry.”

  Selwyn suggested Harry Wagstaff Gribble as the show’s director. He was an experienced Broadway director who had also done some writing.

  His play March Hares had come to London while Tallulah was living there.

  Tallulah liked him, but he hadn’t been feeling well when he started work and after two weeks he withdrew. Cavett replaced him until the arrival of Arthur Beckhard, who began work on January 25. Beckhard was riding high at that moment. A former concert promoter, he had produced and directed two Broadway hits in the last year.

  Forsaking All Others opened in Wilmington, Delaware, on February 3, 1933, and then in Washington, D.C., on February 6 for a week’s run. At the end of the week, Beckhard left the show. He would later claim to the Herald Tribune that his suggestions for changes in stage business had been met with verbose resistance from Tallulah. The final breach came over a scene that Beckhard wanted her to play with her back to the audience. Tallulah rehearsed the scene the way he wanted her to, but at night she did it her way.

  She must have been aware that dismissing Beckhard’s suggestion could make her seem like an old-fashioned ham, who wouldn’t let the audience see her in any position except full-front address. She told the same paper that “I’m not at all averse to playing with my back to the audience, as long as I believe that it’s putting the emphasis where it belongs. But in a light comedy a lot of the laughs come from facial expressions, and I believed that in the scene in question I should have played to the audience, and I did.”

  Dalrymple had written vaudeville scripts during the 1920s, and she recalled that Tallulah asked her frequently about how the script could be improved. She made notes about Tallulah’s performance and gave these to her as well, and in her telling was able to salve Tallulah’s anxieties about her return to the Broadway stage. “I feel safe when you’re around,” Tallulah said to her. Morehouse was also brought in to do some rewriting. It was Morehouse who suggested the show’s next and final director, Thomas Mitchell, who had not yet begun his thirty-year career as one of Hollywood’s foremost character actors.

  From Washington, Forsaking All Others moved to Boston, where it was greeted by most reviewers with genial tolerance. “H.T.P.” in the Boston Transcript didn’t think the play gave Tallulah much to work with, but he appreciated her mining it for as much substance as she could. “Only the fashion in which Mary Clay ‘left at the altar’ pulls her hurt pride together, only her turning upon herself as well as upon the returning Todd, give proof of her mettle as maturing actress. . . . Miss Bankhead is trying to compose and project a character.” The reviewer claimed that “The mannerisms that marred her later days in London have fallen away,” and cited as an example the fact that “only once did the audience hear the husky Tallulah voice.”

  It is interesting to note Tallulah’s sparing use of her deepest and throatiest register. The raspy baritone that is today synonymous with her name actually became chronic only in her final years, when her voice had become coarsened by smoking and drinking. She even told Anton Dolin that professionally she preferred her higher register and always tried to keep her voice higher onstage that it was normally.

  The New York opening was postponed first to February 27, then March 1, as Forsaking All Others added a stop in Providence. Since the Delaware opening a month earlier, there had been many cast changes in roles large and small. Anderson Lawlor, who had been playing a small role, now replaced Douglas Gilmore as Tallulah’s errant fiancé. Lawlor was a fellow Southerner, one of the gay men in Hollywood who congregated on Sundays at George Cukor’s home, and “very funny and very dirty,” Sam Jaffe recalled. “He and Bankhead were marvelous friends.” Lawlor was good at playing wastrels and weaklings, as displayed in his best film role, Kay Francis’s chiseling husband in Cukor’s Girls About Town.

  Tallulah’s love rival Constance Barnes was originally cast with Mary Duncan, a film actress of some repute at the time. On tour, however, Duncan left the show and was replaced by Millicent Hanley. Perhaps Forsaking All Others was not big enough to contain both Tallulah and Duncan—particularly since Duncan’s character was described in the script as “taller and slimmer” than any other character in the play. Or perhaps Duncan’s return to the stage after years of films was not well advised. Soon after, she married and retired altogether.

  But Tallulah had recruited marvelous talents to support her. Shep, the Yale-graduate-turned-dairy-farmer with whom Mary Clay winds up, was played by ace comedian Donald McDonald. Acidic Ilka Chase played Tallulah’s frequently tipsy maid of honor. Cora Witherspoon, like Chase, was a mainstay in Hollywood character parts and played Paula La Salle, a dowager of Gibson girl vintage who functioned as a surrogate mother to Mary Clay.

  The Stage reported days of rehearsals lasting until three and four in the morning as everyone made the final push to pull the show together.

  Mitchell returned the play t
o the lighthearted mood established by Gribble, after Beckhard’s apparent attempt to emphasize its dramatic conflicts.

  Poignancy remained in Tallulah’s performance, however. “It is not a flash act that she puts on, or one bristling with personality alone,” Tallulah’s friend Robert Benchley reported in The New Yorker, “but a quiet, almost tender characterization in which even a sudden cartwheel has moments of pathos.” This was her first cartwheel onstage since The Gold Diggers in 1926, evidence of the author’s attempt to tailor the role to Tallulah and integrate her personal idiosyncrasies into a dramatic rationale. Her cartwheel capped a series of somber ruminations by Tallulah on her fiancé’s desertion, an expression of her bewilderment as well as of her gumption.

  “Maybe I’ll join the circus!” she concludes.

  Tallulah had apparently decided that she would do her best not to be accused of overdoing her star-amplitude personal projection to the detriment of the ensemble. “Right now she has to hold herself back,” John Plant reported in The Stage. “She refuses to be as electric as she can be. That is, except on opening nights, when the excitement always makes her fizz for the public.” Tallulah sometimes referred to the fact that it was for this very reason that she did not give her best performances on opening nights.

  Forsaking All Others could not have opened at a less opportune moment, for the country was panicked at the collapse of its banking system.

  Nevertheless, the first night at the Times Square Theatre went very well.

  “Rush.” in Variety reported that “A cast that somehow conveyed an exhilarating sense of jaunty comedy and an audience palpitating with interest in Tallulah Bankhead’s return to the stage, carried a frothy, superficial trifle of a play to a minor triumph in the theater.”

  Three days after the opening, Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated and the country’s banks began to close in the euphemistically named “bank holiday.” Every show on Broadway was hit hard. Business was poor during the first week of Forsaking All Others, and those who did attend were undoubtedly anxious. The ovation Tallulah had received on opening night was a dismal smattering during the next few performances, dampening her spirits and those of her fellow actors. But banks began reopening on March 13, and the show began to rally; Tallulah was sufficiently encouraged to decide that she would remain in the States. On March 24 Will wrote her about his efforts to have her furniture from 1 Farm Street (which she had put in storage in London) shipped down to Jasper, where it would be kept at Sunset.

  Acting on Broadway allowed Tallulah to return to the nocturnal existence that was impossible in Hollywood. She had begun visiting late-night spots in Harlem a decade earlier, and it remained in the early thirties a mecca for white sojourners. Titillation and entertainment that could not be found easily downtown were readily available. One favorite local character, Gladys Bentley, frequently dressed in pants and a derby hat, “and she would sing these filthy songs,” Ann Andrews recalled fondly. “But such amusing songs you never heard!” Sometimes Bentley donned a skirt, which made possible her trick of picking up paper currency with her vagina, socialite Joe O’Donohue recalled.Watching that stunt “was one of Tallulah’s great entertainments.”

  Harlem was more than a colonial playground for white Manhattanites; it also offered camaraderie between the races that was much less subject to the divisions enforced downtown. On Sunday nights, impresario Jimmy Daniels opened a room sprinkled with chairs and a piano where a cover charge allowed a drink of bathtub gin. Another impresario, Clinton Moore, convened a similar klatch on Saturday nights in a railroad apartment. Tallulah’s friend Stephan Cole boasted that what prevailed at both Daniels’s and Moore’s was “a true mixture of black and white, mostly artists.”

  But at the Cotton Club, at the time the slickest, largest, and most renowned Harlem nightclub, blacks were allowed to enter only through the performers’ entrance. Occasionally black performers at the club did, however, sit in the audience between shows. Fayard Nicholas, younger of the two dancing Nicholas Brothers, recalled in 1993 a night sixty years earlier when Tallulah requested that the two boys join her at her table after they had performed. She found out that the next day was Harold Nicholas’s birthday. She congratulated him and asked if he would like a signed photo of her. He agreed happily. “Well, what about a bicycle?” she asked. He was at least as enthusiastic about that. “Now which one do you want?” Couldn’t he have both? he asked her. She invited them to come to see Forsaking All Others the following night. They were free to go because they didn’t appear at the club until midnight. After the third-act curtain, they went backstage to see Tallulah and found her waiting with hugs and kisses and both photo and bicycle.

  As she had done in London, Tallulah again attracted stagestruck socialites. It was at the crossroads of entertainment and society that Tallulah became romantically involved with John Hay Whitney, a fabulously wealthy venture capitalist, theater fan, and “angel” who had contributed to the funding of any number of Broadway shows. Two years younger than Tallulah, Whitney had been married since 1930 to socialite Liz Altemus.But their marriage was a failure and Whitney “was quite a well-known lover,” Douglas Fairbanks Jr. recalled.

  Despite Whitney’s extensive traffic with the theater, some in his set clung to the old prejudices—or drew the line at Tallulah. Glenn Anders described a conversation with a woman he knew—“rich and then married rich, and very important socially, lived up at the Dakota.” She said to him,

  “Glenn, you’ve got to get in and stop this affair between Tallulah and Jock!”

  Anders pretended not to know what she was talking about.

  “I have not been at all well for a week,” Will had written Tallulah in March, and on April 11 he collapsed while leaving the House floor, having just delivered a heated speech. The Capitol doctor first announced that Will had suffered a heart attack, but soon changed his diagnosis to “acute indigestion.” This was, however, a dodge that Will, enormously invested in his political career, probably requested. Will never fully recovered from what was eventually acknowledged by all concerned as a serious cardiac incident.

  Tallulah would spend the next seven years knowing that there was a good chance that Will might die suddenly at any moment. But during this and subsequent crises she responded stoically, calmly describing to a reporter in her dressing room the risks of his current situation.

  She was trying to keep Forsaking All Others open despite the fact that the grosses had started to slip. By the time the play closed in June, Tallulah had lost $40,000, so she later claimed. She presumably made back some of her money when Margalo Gillmore took the play on tour and more still when MGM bought the film rights. The studio turned Forsaking All Others into a mediocre film that was released in 1934. The great screenwriter Joseph Mankiewicz completely rewrote the play and somehow managed to further diminish a property devised by two neophytes. Tallulah believed that Leland Hayward had taken advantage of her inexperience and should not have let her put her own money into the show. In her autobiography she calls him “one of the most elastic reeds I was ever to lean on.” Fifteen years later, Tallulah considered producing a play by Patricia Coleman, but ultimately backed out. Forsaking All Others was a sufficiently cautionary lesson; it remained her sole venture into production.

  Disaster

  “Don’t think this taught me a lesson!”

  Her notion is that she will not play simple women,” The Stage had reported during Forsaking All Others. “She wants to do only those extremes who have great vitality: ladies of the town and ladies of the court.”

  Tallulah’s next role was not exactly either, but she was certainly exceptional: an almost neurotically headstrong Confederate belle in Jezebel, a new play by Owen Davis, who had coauthored My Sin. She was offered the part by Guthrie McClintic, one of the leading producer/directors of the time, who was married to Broadway star Katharine Cornell. He guided Cornell’s career brilliantly, as well as steering numerous productions starring others. Twenty years e
arlier, he had been briefly married to Estelle Winwood, and was one of the Broadway power brokers Tallulah most liked and respected.

  On July 10, 1933, she signed a contract with McClintic and then soon after skipped off to Los Angeles, for what was both a vacation and a chance to test her prospects anew in Hollywood. She lived for several weeks in a bungalow at the Garden of Allah complex in Beverly Hills, owned by her childhood idol, Russian actress Alla Nazimova.

  In Hollywood, Tallulah made the social rounds with Alan Vincent, her ex-roommate, and made merry with the guests in adjoining bungalows at the Garden of Allah. Laurence Olivier and his then-wife, actress Jill Esmond, were living there, as well as the great humorist, comic actor, and drama critic Robert Benchley. It’s very possible that Tallulah and Benchley were involved and that her Hollywood trip was a chance to rendezvous with him away from his wife. Composer Vincent Youmans was also installed in a bungalow and Tallulah spent hours listening to him play his songbook of classic show tunes.

  Hollywood remained interested in Tallulah. Tallulah said in 1951 that she had—to her later regret—turned down Bette Davis’s waitress role in Of Human Bondage because she was afraid that her attempt at a Cockney accent would sound ridiculous to friends back in England. MGM was interested in her starring in a film of Ivor Novello’s play Party, in which the role of wayward actress Miranda Clayfoot was both suspiciously similar to Tallulah, as well as written by Novello for her. It had been performed in London a year earlier and was being prepared for a Broadway opening as well.