Tallulah!

by Joel Lobenthal

  Her leading man was Earl Larrimore, a good and popular actor. The director was Russian-born Robert Milton, one of the busiest on Broadway.

  “We get along splendidly,” Milton told the Herald Tribune. “Tallulah is delightful for a director to work with because, like Nazimova and Mrs. Fiske, she is willing to trust the judgment of the people concerned for her technique and business.” (Milton was undoubtedly using technique here not to mean acumen but rather approach, style, attack.)

  Robert Henderson, a young actor who later married Estelle Winwood, attended the November 9 opening at the Plymouth Theatre. He was thrilled by the “doomed quality” that hovered around Tallulah’s Judith Traherne from her first appearance. She was “a woman who the gods were going to catch. She was fighting against an invisible web.” Tallulah interjected her own recklessness, making the character “the kind of woman who will dare anything and doesn’t care, even though she knows she’s going to destroy herself.” Henderson recalled with pleasure her singular neurotic/erotic tone established in the early scene when her doctor’s probing flashlight reveals that her eyes are failing, and found her extraordinarily convincing in the final scene of enveloping blindness. Stephan Cole, too, said that she was heartbreaking.

  Robert Garland in the Telegram wrote that she had acted with “unflagging skill.” In the Sun, Richard Lockridge wrote: “Miss Bankhead gives an altogether admirable performance for the first sane act and a half. At odd moments even in the later difficult moments she brings into her playing a note of tense feeling which cuts through the theatricalism.”

  At her lowest ebb, Judith Traherne thinks of giving herself to the groom at her estate stables. Waggish Percy Hammond of the Herald Tribune was intrigued by this scene in which “Miss Bankhead was gorgeously tempting and tempted, and for a moment or two many of us feared that she would request him to visit her in the middle of the night.”

  Business was lukewarm. Variety speculated that Dark Victory was the right play at the wrong time. “Tragedy has a place in the theatre, but it seems so much vexation has plagued the people that they prefer to be amused instead of going through an ordeal.” The paper’s “Ibee.” reported that several of the first-night audience had passed out in response to the tensely realistic medical examination Tallulah received in the opening scene; now the script was said to be in the process of being “lightened,” as Whitney was committed to giving Dark Victory a fighting chance.

  Joe O’Donohue spoke with all the unwitting condescension of his class and his time when he said, “I think he liked her very much and even when you’re Jock Whitney, Tallulah Bankhead—an actress, and with that personality—had a great allure.” For her part, Tallulah was “crazy about Jock,” Cole recalled. She expected her beaux to meet high and critical standards. Whitney was an accomplished businessman, sportsman, and a man of some aesthetic discernment, yet his manner was charmingly self-effacing. He was “everything she wanted,” Cole said.

  Tallulah said to Glenn Anders that she didn’t think she was beautiful, but she knew that she needn’t take great pains to look wonderful. “I saw her so many times get out of the tub, climb into a slip, run a comb through her hair, smear with the lipstick, into the dress and out the door.” But when she was going to see Whitney she took extensive care about her appearance. She was happy to go out with him alone, which was rare for Tallulah, who usually traveled with a party.

  Their relationship was not without great frustrations. As attractive as she found him, Tallulah could not experience an orgasm with him. He was aware of this and it bothered both of them. When she recalled this to actor Sandy Campbell in 1956, she attributed it to her not being able to reach a climax with any man with whom she was in love, a polarization between emotional and physical intimacy that may have prompted Tallulah’s restless exchange of partner after partner. It’s also possible that her hysterectomy had affected her sexual response.

  Nor could she have a child by Whitney, which would have been her ace card in cementing their relationship. After four years of marriage, Whitney had no children, which was attributed around town to his wife’s not wanting them. Animals were Liz Whitney’s great passion. She owned an enormous menagerie, and bred horses and dogs. Helen Hay Whitney, however, desperately wanted an heir for her only son. She offered a million dollars to any woman who could produce one, and Cole said that she didn’t care “whether it was Tallulah or the laundry woman.”

  “I choose to believe what I choose to believe,” Tallulah would tell Cole.

  For a while, what Tallulah chose to believe was that her hysterectomy had somehow not been absolute.

  “It’s a miracle; I’m bloated,” Tallulah told Cole. “Then stop eating,” he said. “Tallulah,” Cole reminded her, “they took everything out. Everything.”

  No pregnancy of course materialized, and Tallulah’s sterility became a continued source of anger and sorrow. Her drinking seemed to increase, and her drug use was also considerable.

  Insomnia had dogged Tallulah since, at the latest, her Paramount days, when Screen Book magazine reported her reading through the night because of persistent difficult falling asleep. By the time she returned to New York, Tallulah had turned for remedy to barbiturates that soon hooked her into a psychotropic treadmill, which did not stop her from indulging in recreational drug use as well. O’Donohue remembered Tallulah sending Cole to Harlem with twenty dollars, enough for cab rides both ways as well as for a purchase of cocaine. “I went to Harlem once to buy cocaine for her,”

  Eugenia Bankhead recalled in 1971. Over supper one night at the Algonquin, Tallulah asked Gladys Henson, “Am I tidy?” after returning from the women’s room. “She was covered in cocaine, all down a beautiful black dress,” Henson recalled. “ ‘No,’ I told her, ‘you look like a Southern colonel with a little white mustache and some powder all down your front.’ ” Tallulah laughed herself silly and repeated the story to all and sundry.

  That fall, Henson and Sybil Thorndike arrived from London to re-create their roles in John van Druten’s The Distaff Side, in which Estelle Winwood was also starring. Tallulah and Thorndike were both staying at the Gotham Hotel at Fifty-fifth Street and Fifth Avenue. At three o’clock one morning, Tallulah rang Thorndike’s room. “This is Tallulah speaking.

  I’m having a few friends in from London. You must come, must come along.” After Thorndike arrived in a nightgown, Tallulah delivered an en-comium to her brilliance, concluding by telling her, “You’re a fucking dear old darling, and I love you,” and giving her a kiss. Later in the evening, Thorndike announced that she would have to buy a dressier nightgown.

  She became a frequent guest at Tallulah’s.

  “She almost had a salon at the Gotham,” Gladys Henson said. If she was working, Tallulah used to take a nap after getting home from the theater and then she’d get up at 2:00 A.M. and preside over open house. Marijuana was very prominent in her vicinity during the 1930s. Hugh Williams, Tallulah’s lover and colleague from London, was visiting Manhattan. Early one morning, he walked into Tallulah’s suite and with a show of comic disbelief quipped, “I think I smell a Chesterfield!”

  For Tallulah, doctors were increasingly both caregivers and drug sup-pliers. In London she had been used to spraying her throat with a cocaine-laced solution that was prescribed for laryngitis. In New York, Dr. Milton Reder, Tallulah’s eye, ear, nose, and throat physician, liberally prescribed a similar solution. In 1983, he recalled frequent summonses to her dressing room to administer his elixir. Tallulah’s stage fright resulted in frequent attacks of laryngitis, which her smoking of course exacerbated. But Stephan Cole described, too, a little game, in which Reder, making a house call to Tallulah’s suite, would conveniently disappear to the bathroom, giving Tallulah the chance to rummage through his bag and pilfer several vials of his solution. Both doctor and patient played dumb, but, Cole believed, the cost of the drugs found their way onto Tallulah’s bills.

  On December 20, 1934, Tallulah went to sleep around 3:00 A
.M. looking forward to the next day’s matinee. The company manager had told her it was the first sold-out performance since the opening night. She awoke to find that her voice was gone. Estelle Winwood, who’d spent the night at Tallulah’s, called Dr. Reder. He instructed Tallulah to proceed to the theater and he would see her there. By the time Tallulah reached the theater, her face was swelling rapidly. Dr. Reder sent her home and the matinee was canceled. Tallulah had contracted an infection that was then potentially deadly, but could today have been cured immediately with a dose of penicillin, Reder recalled.

  Without Tallulah, Whitney was not interested in prolonging Dark Victory. It closed immediately. But in 1939 it became one of Bette Davis’s most memorable vehicles, as did Jezebel in 1938. Davis’s performance in the former was perhaps influenced by Tallulah’s, for Dark Victory’s company manager later told Cole that Davis was in the audience for one of Tallulah’s performances in New York.

  Tallulah spent several weeks in bed, wrapping a veil around her face to receive visitors and savoring the air of mystery it provided. But no sooner was she on the way to recovery than her father was again in the throes of a health crisis. On New Year’s Day, 1935, he was hospitalized in Washington, D.C., for “a medical examination and rest,” due to what was described as a“cold and indigestion.” He had just been nominated to the position of floor leader in the House of Representatives. The New York Times reported the family’s fears that this was actually a reprise of his “severe heart ailment” of two years earlier, which had also been publicly diagnosed as indigestion. This is exactly what it turned out to be, and it was months before he regained full mobility. By January 6, Tallulah was well enough to fly to Washington to visit him, but returned to New York immediately to start work on her next play.

  Producer Sam H. Harris, who had presented her in Nice People in 1921, had approached her with an offer to star in a revival of Rain. He had been the producer of the original production in 1922. From the moment she had been dismissed by Maugham in London in 1925, Tallulah had vowed that she would someday play Sadie Thompson successfully. And now Maugham was apparently no longer an obstacle.

  Yet Rain as a theatrical property had become somewhat shopworn. Gloria Swanson and Joan Crawford had starred in film versions. After Broadway, Eagels had toured it extensively across the United States. It had also been performed by great Broadway stars in summer stock and the “subway circuit,” which comprised a separate itinerary of theaters, clustered as near as the Shubert-Riviera on Ninety-sixth Street and Broadway and continuing north and east throughout the boroughs of New York City. However, Tallulah said that “nearly all of my friends—managers, directors, actors, and just plain, non-theatrical people”—advised her to accept his offer.

  A well-built and gripping drama, Rain continues to reward reading to this day. Although the character of Sadie has become something of a cliché, she is one of the greatest in theatrical literature of the period.

  Sadie’s tough rowdiness conjoined with intermittent self-doubt and chinks of vulnerability fit the layering of Tallulah’s on- and offstage personas.

  “I’m in quite a spot,” Tallulah confided to a reporter. “One minute I’m thrilled to death and the next I wake up in a cold sweat. It’s a bit different from anything I’ve ever done. . . . I’ve played bad girls before, but they were always ladies, more or less. But now . . . I’m a nice little common bad girl—a cheap little floozie.”

  Tallulah always believed that Maugham had turned thumbs down on her in 1925 because her performance in rehearsals mimicked Jeanne Eagels’s. To Howard Barnes of the Tribune, Tallulah now described her“fear of seeming to borrow anything from that memorable performance. . . . If I appeared in ‘Rain,’ I wanted to make Sadie Thompson my own interpretation of the part. . . .” Cole recalled her capacity to discern true and appropriate details of character and costuming. “If she were this kind of a person, she would do this or that; Sadie Thompson would use this kind of a handkerchief, carry this kind of a bag, not that.”

  At the out-of-town opening in Philadelphia, Tallulah’s eyes were teary as she gave a curtain speech. “From the fact that I am playing this part, where ‘Rain’ was first given, with Jeanne Eagels, people must think I am either the bravest or the most conceited woman in the world. Neither of these things is true. Nobody has more respect for Jeanne Eagels than I, God bless her.”

  Tallulah’s Rain arrived at Broadway’s Music Box Theater on February 12, 1935. Years later Tallulah said that, daunted by the memory of Eagels, she once again hadn’t given as good an opening night performance as she could have. When Barnes interviewed her the afternoon following the opening, he found her going over every moment of the performance. “I think I’ll do a better job tonight,” she told Barnes, “when there aren’t so many in the house overanxious to have my performance a success, rooting for me and holding their collective breaths every time I come to a bit of business.”

  In the Times, Brooks Atkinson described her as “an actress of extraordinary range,” who was well equipped “for every situation the play invents—fear, remorse, pathos, contempt and pity for the misery of the world.” But he thought that Eagels had dissolved more naturally into the part, and synthesized its many facets more coherently.

  Harris had assigned Sam Forrest, one of his oldest and closest associates, to direct Rain. Tallulah praised his work, but it is likely that the ideas about interpretation were hers. In 1922, the public was still asking that theatrical prostitutes nurture hearts of gold beating within their bespan-gled breasts. Tallulah could well have surmised that the times were ready for a rougher, franker interpretation. She may have gone overboard in making Sadie too salty, too rowdy. Richard Lockridge in the Sun found her too raucous in her initial scenes but said that when she unbuckled her defensive armor she was even more vulnerable than Eagels had been.

  Tallulah believed that she had worked on and improved her performance over the run. This is certainly possible; Cole described her as “a severe critic of her own work.” He saw her admit mistakes she’d made with a part, “not audibly but mentally. She’d go to work on it after reading the notices—in the theater, without saying a word.” Tallulah also was willing to call up critics and ask them for additional response beyond what they had written. Elliot Norton, who became the dean of Boston critics, recalled that this was how she struck up a long friendship with him during these years. Tallulah was “willing to accept negative criticism if you could back it up,” Norton recalled in 1995.

  Will remained in the hospital, where he had been sworn in as house floor leader at the end of January. Tallulah was flying to Washington once a week to visit him. Florence Bankhead vigilantly attended Will’s bedside at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Tallulah thought that Rain might be a good diversion and invited Florence to come to New York for a matinee. As soon as Florence accepted, however, Tallulah started to panic, seized with the conviction that Florence would be offended by Sadie’s profanity. Tallulah decided she couldn’t wait to hear the worst and summoned Florence backstage during the first intermission. But Florence was delighted: “Tallulah, honey, you’re just precious, Sugar. You’re just like you were when you were a child. Remember your tantrums?”

  Tallulah told the Tribune’s Barnes that she hoped Rain would run but confided that she was already scouting for her next play, preferably a high comedy. She complained that most of the finest comedy writers were either working on motion picture adaptations, or, like Maugham himself, had given up writing plays. She had beseeched S. N. Behrman to write a play for her. She’d wanted to star in his Serena Blandish during her recent stay in England. He wrote the most sophisticated drawing-room comedies of the day, gracefully incorporating liberal social and political comment.

  It’s not clear what happened with this project, but the idea appears to have been what materialized in 1939 as No Time for Comedy, by which time Tallulah was starring in The Little Foxes. It was Katharine Cornell, making one of her rare stabs at comedy, who starred
in the role Behrman had once envisioned for Tallulah.

  Tallulah was going to need a script sooner rather than later, because Rain lasted only forty-seven performances. Ward Morehouse, who had been one of the boosters urging Tallulah to take the part, revisited the revival in its last week. In the Sun, he wrote that while Tallulah’s colleagues were excellent, because of Rain’s familiarity, another star should have been cast opposite Tallulah. He thought that Tallulah’s work had improved since the opening night. Marlene Dietrich sat three seats away from Morehouse, and he watched her at the final curtain stand up and clap her hands “with all her strength.”

  Tallulah thought about bringing Rain to London, but then developed cold feet. After her disappointing showing in films, her illnesses, and yet another Broadway flop, she had come to believe that she was jinxed. Desperation attended everything to do with her next play, Something Gay, which she began rehearsing for the Shuberts on March 25, 1935, days after Rain had closed. Something Gay was written by Adelaide Heilbron, a successful screenwriter who had worked on My Sin. It was a story of marital dare and double dare, in which Tallulah as Monica Grey suspects her husband of cavorting with an apartment-house neighbor. She resolves to flirt with an old flame of hers. But her husband calls her bluff by encouraging her and her old swain, with predictable results: she and her ex-lover decide to revive their old affection for real.

  Walter Pidgeon, whose Hollywood career had temporarily run aground, played Tallulah’s husband. Silky-smooth British actor Hugh Sinclair, then at the peak of his considerable popularity, enacted Tallulah’s lover. Thomas Mitchell again directed her. “She would completely be guided by him,” recalled John Kenley, a member of the Shuberts’ production staff at the time.

  On April 2, Will wrote Tallulah that he was improving slowly but was still homebound except for the occasional spins his driver took him on when the weather was good. He was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to return to Congress before the end of the session. “I was pretty hard hit and am still off a great deal in weight but am picking up a little.” Tallulah had engaged a heart specialist in Baltimore, a certain Dr. Thomas, to treat her father and had apparently promised to pay his bill. “I regret very much to have to remind you of it,” but the doctor was sending Will his bill and he had no choice but to send it on to her. “I hope that you can find it convenient to send him the money now.”