Tallulah!

by Joel Lobenthal

  Party describes the saturnalia in Miranda’s apartment as she presides over a party commemorating her latest opening night. It offers an interesting portrait of the bluff in Tallulah’s facade and the process by which a persona is constructed. Tallulah’s vices were all real, but equally all exaggerated by her in her pursuit of notoriety. But some of Miranda’s purported vices are simply for show—carrying a box of cocaine that she never actually sniffs. At the close of the third act, she submits to the tutelage of grande dame Mrs. MacDonald, patterned after and then played by Mrs.Patrick Campbell.

  But Party was not going to fly with Tallulah—it was never filmed—because MGM was said to insist that Tallulah perform it in Los Angeles before they would film it. Tallulah returned to New York, attended the premiere of George Cukor’s Dinner at Eight, and started rehearsing Jezebel on August 11. Frances Creel, daughter of the great Belasco star Blanche Bates, was making her stage debut in Jezebel. “She’s such a sport,” Creel told the Evening Post about Tallulah, “she’s grand, she keeps the whole company amused.” Tallulah and Creel were photographed together. Tallulah was tan and gorgeous. No one could have suspected that she was gravely ill.

  Complaining of violent abdominal pains, Tallulah checked into Doctors’ Hospital on August 26. Her stomach had started to swell. An initial bulletin stated that she had kidney stones, but Tallulah recalls in her autobiography that she was suspected of having an intestinal flu brought on by sleeping with a fan close to her bed. Her fellow actors came to her hospital room and rehearsed with her.

  She was then allowed to leave the hospitalduring the day, dosed with painkillers, to attend rehearsals at the Martin Beck, but her condition did not improve. The Philadelphia opening was canceled. Tallulah sent a telegram of profuse apology to the local producing group that was to present Jezebel there. McClintic was still trying to go ahead with the Broadway opening, scheduled for September 25. He announced that the play would open cold in New York, without any preliminary tryouts on the road. When that, too, began to seem unlikely, Tallulah begged McClintic to find another actress and continue with the production. Margaret Sullavan, who had not yet hit it big in Hollywood, was approached by McClintic and accepted, but he soon reconsidered and decided to stake his hopes on Tallulah’s recovery, even though it meant great financial hardship for him.

  The production was intended to be sumptuous, including a full complement of choir-singing plantation slaves. On September 18, all twenty-eight actors and singers were given two weeks’ pay in lieu of the four weeks’ half pay customarily paid for the rehearsal period. But the cast did not want to look for new jobs; they still hoped to begin work again soon.

  “There is something ferocious about the loyalty of the ill-starred ‘Jezebel’company to its ill star,” Leo Fontaine commented in the Telegraph.

  A day later, Tallulah called Ward Morehouse from her hospital room and told him:

  All I want in this world is to get well and get out of here. I’ll start rehearsing the day I crawl out of this hospital, and I hope to open in ‘Jezebel’ in five weeks. It’s a fine play, a swell play, different from anything I’ve ever done, and I hope to do justice to the play and the part.

  The doctors tell me that I’ll surely be able to start playing within a month or so. I’m getting rested, and this is good for me whether I like it or not. Guthrie McClintic is a saint and an angel and the best director in the world, and it’ll be heaven to start working for him.

  On September 22, newspapers reported that Tallulah would leave Doctors’ Hospital in about a week’s time. She would rest for two more weeks, and then pick up where she’d left off with Jezebel. They would still be able to open on Broadway at the end of October. But as it turned out, Tallulah’s condition once more prevented the play from resuming. “During all this time the doctors promised she will be out by next Tuesday, etc.,”

  Edie Smith wrote Will weeks later, “till it all seemed endless and the poor child was suffering terribly. . . .”

  The last thing Tallulah would have ever allowed Will to share with her was a personal crisis; her customary evasiveness was now exacerbated by her awareness that his health was fragile. On September 29, Will wired Tallulah at the hospital:I CONTINUE TO BE EXTREMELY ANXIOUS ABOUT YOUR CONDITION I HAD HEARD NOTHING FROM EDIE AS PROMISED PLEASE URGE HER TO WRITE ME IMMEDIATELY RELIEVING MY ANXIETY STOP PLEASE SEND ME BRIEF TELEGRAM AT ONCE GIVING ME YOUR CONDITION AND IF STILL IN HOSPITAL STOP WITH ALL LOVE AND DEVOTION IN WHICH FLORENCE JOINS.

  On October 16, Tallulah was finally allowed to leave Doctors’ Hospital. The press reported that she was “said to be recovering rapidly.” Before long, however, she began running a dangerously high fever and losing weight rapidly. She checked into Lenox Hill Hospital, where she was attended by three doctors including her gynecologist, Dr. Mortimer Rodgers.

  Rodgers was the brother of composer Richard Rodgers and the head of OB-GYN at Lenox Hill. Exploratory surgery finally supplied the answer her doctors had been searching for: Tallulah was suffering from gonorrhea that had so completely assailed her reproductive system that her life was now threatened.

  On November 3, Tallulah underwent a five-hour radical hysterectomy.

  News reports stating that she had undergone a “slight operation” were then amended, confirming surgery described as needed to remove “an abdominal tumor.” Tallulah was so ill that she read her own obituary in one newspaper.

  She was released from Lenox Hill at the end of November, having been hospitalized for nine weeks out of the previous twelve. Her weight was down to seventy-five pounds, but her wit remained robust. “Don’t think this has taught me a lesson!” she said to Dr. Rodgers as she left the hospital.

  A nurse attended her in her suite at the Élysée. On December 1, Edie Smith wrote Will telling him about the operation but fogging over all details: I sincerely hope you will pardon me for not having written you all about Miss Tallulah’s illness earlier, her condition was so uncertain each time I intended writing you therefore I thought you would gain more news by wire and also she instructed me not to worry you especially as all the doctors agreed she was not in a serious condition, however it seems her condition was much more serious than they thought.

  McClintic had no choice now but to replace Tallulah; Miriam Hopkins opened in Jezebel on December 19, but the play lasted only four weeks.

  The physical and emotional trauma of Tallulah’s hysterectomy cannot be underestimated. The subsequent course of her life would indicate that she was in some ways irrevocably altered by it. A hysterectomy shocks a woman’s body into an instant menopause; any remedial hormonal treatment would have been perfunctory by today’s standards—if it existed at all. We will probably never know whether the hysterectomy could have been avoided had her condition been correctly diagnosed earlier.

  It was during her recuperation that Tallulah renewed her acquaintance with Stephan Cole, an aspiring actor whom she had met a year earlier at a party. He was a friend of Edie Smith and Smith now brought him over to Tallulah’s suite at the Élysée to play bridge. A genial and well-informed man, Cole became one of the most important people in Tallulah’s life.

  From 1937 to 1948 he was stage manager or assistant stage manager on ten of her productions. Shrewd and efficient, he possessed an obstinacy that in its heyday must have rivaled Tallulah’s. He earned Tallulah’s respect and confidence; she trusted him with information that most people around her didn’t have. Tallulah told Cole that it was Hollywood’s George Raft who had given her gonorrhea.

  Her doctors had told Tallulah to spend two weeks in a tropical climate recuperating, but for once she actively wanted to be home with her family, and she decided to spend Christmas in Jasper. She says in her autobiography that she arrived “haggard and pale as the ghost of Hamlet’s father,” but with an enormous appetite. Her trip was shadowed by mutual anxiety between Tallulah and her father, who had recently suffered another cardiac incident. Each wanted to allay the other’s worries and bluffed about
how rapidly each was recuperating. Will wanted to show off Tallulah and asked her to appear with him at a movie theater in town. Tallulah put on her best little black dress and pearls to ascend the ramshackle stairway behind a feed store that led to the theater. She planned on collecting her thoughts while her father introduced her; instead, words failed the normally eloquent congressman. “Ladies and gentleman,” Will announced, “my little girl” and disappeared into his seat. Tallulah explained to the audience what had just happened and all was smooth sailing for the rest of the evening.

  But these and similar social exertions took their toll, and she later complained that she’d suffered a relapse “from all the bloody handshaking”she’d done during her intended recuperation.

  She returned to New York and went back to bed. “Normal women go into melancholia after a hysterectomy,” Tallulah told a friend in her final years, “and I’m pretty normal for an abnormal woman!” Her despair and depression are visible in some of the series of photographs taken by Carl Van Vechten at the end of January 1934, as is her drastic weight loss, which in some pictures makes her bone structure even more strikingly delineated. But within a couple of months, Tallulah was physically much improved; she now weighed 125 pounds and was starting to diet again. She decided that a visit to England would cheer her. Together with Edie, Tallulah set sail on March 31 and arrived in Southampton a week later. In London they checked into the Hotel Splendide on Piccadilly.

  In May she began an affair with Rex Whistler, a noted artist, illustrator, and muralist. “I have been having an affair with Tallulah Bankhead,”

  Whistler told his brother Laurence, who recalls in his biography of Rex that he remarked, “not without the twinge of venial envy that was requisite, and looked for, ‘Wasn’t that rather alarming?’ ”

  “It might have been,” Rex replied, “but, do you know, the curious thing is, she was shy of me!” After her recent ordeal, Tallulah was rather sobered about sex, Whistler told his brother, describing an erection as “the dreary conjuring trick men produce.” “Not very romantic!” Whistler complained to Laurence.

  An odd paradox of Tallulah was that despite her erratic behavior, she was usually meticulously punctual and expected others to be as well. One evening Whistler arrived two hours late for dinner. He carried bouquets of white and yellow tulips but explained that he had found them too prosaic and had touched them up with black stripes on the white and black dots on the yellow. The paint had taken a long time to dry. He was forgiven.

  “Rex was gentle,” David Herbert recalled, unlike so many of the brash bons vivants Tallulah knew. “I think she was very, very touched that this wonderful young artist was in love with her.” His ardor was reciprocated—“as far as darling Tallulah could be in love with anybody!” In any case, he saw great tenderness between them. “Tallulah-hula,” Rex Whistler called her, and told his brother that she was witty and warm, “not intimidating . . . just fun.”

  London was a glorious reaffirmation for Tallulah. Her hotel suite over-flowed with floral tributes. Herbert said that going out with her was “like being out with Garbo,” with people standing up in restaurants to get a better look. She was feeling strong enough to go back to work and, elated by her reception in England, decided to take a job there. In accordance with her status as an alien and a visitor, she requested permission from the Home Office to perform at a benefit organized by Lady Pembroke, David Herbert’s mother, and the annual garden party given by the Actors’ Benevolent Fund.

  Her request touched off a minor debate in the Home Office. Surviving documents reveal that several on its staff were bitter that the surveillance she’d been under in 1928 had not been sufficient to push through a deportation.

  On May 31, the Home Office informed her that the secretary of state “does not wish to raise objection” to her appearance at the two charity functions, but was “unable to agree to her taking other engagements.”

  But she had already accepted an offer to tour Britain’s music halls for five weeks in the same one-act play, The Snob, in which she’d made her variety debut at the Palladium back in 1929. On June 8, producer Daniel Mayer made formal petition to the Home Office to allow her to fulfill these tour engagements. Within the office, opinion was divided. “Knowing what we do of this woman,” one officer wrote, “I think it is undesirable that she should be allowed to remain here & take engagements. We have already told her that she cannot take employment here.” A colleague disagreed, stating that “if we object there is sure to be a fuss. . . . I do not think we could justify refusal, having admitted her to the country.”

  Reluctantly, permission was granted, and Tallulah opened in Liverpool in The Snob on June 18, 1934. The Stage’s Liverpool correspondent described her role as “much too slender for her to do herself anything like justice. She acts, needless to say, with accomplished ease and grace, but even so talented an actress as Miss Bankhead cannot put life into a part which scarcely exists.”

  Tallulah renewed contact with producer/director Basil Dean, who had been so important to her earlier London career. On July 2 and again on July 19, Dean’s office wrote the Home Office, telling them that Dean was considering Tallulah for the lead in a new J. B. Priestley play and his plans would be ruptured should she be forced to leave the country. From the Queen’s Hotel in Birmingham, Tallulah wrote on July 7 requesting permission to remain through the summer to discuss pending engagements, but not dependent on her accepting them, “as my Doctor strongly urges me not to return to New York during the terrific heat.”

  Performers were not generally granted residency extensions simply to look for work, yet an internal Home Office report dated July 12 stated:“However unsavory her personal reputation may be Tallulah Bankhead is a‘star artist’ . . . and until we are prepared to refuse her admission to U.K. . . . we shall only make ourselves look foolish if we attempt to bring her stay to an end on a frivolous pretext. . . .” On July 17, Tallulah received permission to remain until September 30.

  Will was not aware that Tallulah was again working, for on June 23 he had written her at the Splendide that “I’ve been very anxious to hear something from you about your plans and how you are getting along. I hope that as soon as you see this you will have Edie write to me at once as I am tremendously concerned about your future.”

  Tallulah’s sister had also been in London the previous fall, where she had announced her engagement to Kennedy McConnell, son of a retired Scottish coal magnate. Soon afterward they called off the engagement; this happened more than once during the early 1930s, as Eugenia, now realizing that she could not live with Morton Hoyt, lunged impulsively at those whom she mistook for potentially permanent partners. In the spring of 1934, she was visiting Will and Florence in Washington. Perhaps Tallulah had turned off her cash spigot to her sister, for Will wrote that he had now started giving her an allowance again, which he claimed was “a great burden on me . . . but under the circumstances I feel that I ought to do so as long as possible.”

  Theatre World reported that Tallulah would return to the London stage that fall in a new comedy, a reference perhaps to the Priestley play, or to S. N. Behrman’s Serena Blandish, in which Tallulah was apparently interested in starring. An exquisitely ironic comedy of manners, Serena Blandish had played on Broadway in 1929. Tallulah would essay the role originated by Ruth Gordon, a young woman whose straight-shooting ways founder her amid the corruption of British high society.

  But a transatlantic call from Jock Whitney, Tallulah’s favorite New York beau, was enough for her to reverse course entirely. He was sending her the script of Dark Victory, a new play by Bertram Block and George Brewer Jr., that he wanted to produce on Broadway in the fall. He cabled:THIS REALLY IS WORTH YOUR WHILE AND JUST YOUR DISH SO TAKE A LONG BREATH READ IT AND CABLE SOON STOP BY THEWAY YOU’VE BEEN GONE LONG ENOUGH LOVE.

  Dark Victory was the story of a Long Island socialite whose life is spent in frivolous pastimes when she discovers she has a brain tumor. She falls in love with th
e idealistic doctor who treats her. In the Vermont countryside, they enjoy a brief respite before she faces imminent death with the realization that their relationship has redeemed the meaningless life she had been leading.

  New is perhaps not the right word for Dark Victory: the property had been floating around the entertainment capitals of both American coasts.

  Tallulah had read it and rejected it while she was still in Hollywood. Earlier in 1934, Katharine Hepburn had agreed to try it out in summer stock and then changed her mind. But Tallulah left London in late September, soon after the script reached her. Whitney assured her that no less a playwright than Maxwell Anderson had spent time revising it. More attractive was the flattery of Whitney’s wishing to invest in her, and the possibility it may have suggested that he would consider divorcing his wife and marrying Tallulah.

  Recovery

  “I choose to believe what I choose to believe.”

  Well-schooled as Tallulah was in the art of glossing over holes in a script, and still nervous about the quality of Dark Victory, she determined that it would receive the very finest in the way of production values. Robert Edmond Jones was recruited to design the sets. Jones was the elder statesman of Broadway set designers, very much influenced by European experiments in stagecraft. He had designed the settings for John Barrymore’s Richard III and Hamlet a decade earlier. Tallulah’s costumes were by Elsa Schiaparelli, whose strapless satin gown she had recently modeled for British Vogue.

  Tallulah negotiated her contract with John F. Wharton, the attorney who handled all of Whitney’s theatrical investments. David O. Selznick was already considering filming Dark Victory with Garbo, and Tallulah was hardly interested in serving as a dry run for another actress. She won a contract stipulation that if she did not play Judith Traherne on screen she would receive a percentage of the film sale.